For generations, Indiana football was associated with futility.
Before Curt Cignetti’s hiring after the 2023 season, the Hoosiers had just 13 winning seasons since the moon landing. They had only three bowl wins in their history, the last of which came in 1991. They hadn’t won more than eight games since 1967. Perhaps most notably (and infamously), they had more losses all-time than any other FBS program.
From virtually the moment Cignetti arrived from James Madison and implored everyone to Google him, things have quickly changed. Over the past two seasons, Indiana has gone 27-2, including a 16-0 2025 season that culminated with a 27-21 win against Miami in the College Football Playoff championship game that delivered the program its first national title.
Along the way, the Hoosiers were battling more than just their own woeful history.
College football’s not a sport that’s typically kind to upstarts, with a hardened top caste of elite programs that have the most resources and a disproportionate amount of championships. With its victory Monday, Jan. 19, Indiana became the first first-time champion at the FBS level since Florida in 1996, before everyone on the Hoosiers’ current roster (old as it may be) were born.
Indiana’s triumph is impressive by any measurement, but it also raises a question — who might be the next first-time champion?
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Here are five potential options:
Who will be college football’s next first-time national champion?
Oregon
The first and only place this list could start is with the team Indiana wiped out in the semifinals on its way to the championship.
Oregon has been painfully and frustratingly close to the sport’s ultimate prize for the past quarter-century, with the plucky underdog from the Pacific Northwest morphing into one of college football’s modern-day juggernauts in that time. The Ducks have made the national championship game twice, losing to Auburn in 2010 and Ohio State in 2014. Under 39-year-old coach Dan Lanning, they’ve gone 48-8 and made the College Football Playoff in each of the past two seasons. With quarterback Dante Moore spurning the NFL draft, they’ll be among the preseason favorites to win the national title heading into next season.
Oregon has seemingly anything a program could desire — national cachet, major-conference membership (and the money that comes with it), a prodigious coach and vast NIL resources thanks in some part to their close connection to Nike and co-founder Phil Knight. Though nothing is ever a guarantee in college football, it seems to be a matter of when, not if, the Ducks win a title.
Texas Tech
Few, if any, schools have embraced the new NIL landscape in college sports quite as effectively as the Red Raiders, whether it’s in men’s basketball, softball or football. With the financial help of billionaire booster Cody Campbell, who was a lineman at the school under the late Mike Leach, Texas Tech brought in one of the best and most expensive transfer hauls last offseason. Thanks to dominant offensive and defensive lines, the Red Raiders won their first Big 12 title and earned a playoff bye.
They’re already running a similar playbook for next season, with top-rated transfer quarterback Brendan Sorsby coming aboard, and as long as Campbell is actively engaged with his alma mater, it’s hard to imagine Texas Tech falling too far off, especially in a wide-open and watered-down Big 12 that should provide a navigable annual path to the playoff.
SMU
Speaking of Texas schools with deep-pocketed boosters who made a fortune in energy, let’s take a look at the Mustangs. SMU has enjoyed a rapid rise going 63-26 over the past seven seasons and moving from the American Conference to the ACC, a jump that was made possible thanks to the university forgoing nine years of ACC television revenue to get an invitation to the league.
The Mustangs have a bright, offensively minded head coach in Rhett Lashlee, who is contractually tethered to the school through the 2032 season. They’ve shown they can make the playoff, having done so in 2024. They’re located in the middle of one of the most talent-rich metro areas in the country. And, of course, it helps to have people willing to dump some of their exorbitant wealth into your program.
Arizona State
The Sun Devils fit the mold of many of the programs on this list. They have a wunderkind coach in Kenny Dillingham, a 35-year-old offensive whiz who seems as well-equipped as any of his colleagues to navigate the sport in the age of NIL and the transfer portal. They’ve recently made the playoff, having done so as the Big 12 champion in 2024. There are demographic factors working in their favor, namely that they’re one of the country’s largest schools located in one of the nation’s largest metro areas.
The most glaring missing piece might be money, something Dillingham addressed last month when he put out a call for $20 million from a would-be donor he said he would make ‘the most famous person in the city.’ If he’s able to get something close to that, watch out, but even without it, he’s got Arizona State in an enviable position.
Wisconsin
The Badgers would have been right there with Oregon on a similar list as recently as five years ago, but they’ve mysteriously struggled under coach Luke Fickell, who was widely hailed a home-run hire four years ago before managing just a 17-21 record thus far.
Still, this is a Big Ten program that was, until recently, one of the sport’s most reliably successful outfits, with 22 consecutive bowl appearances and 10 10-win seasons from 2002-23. Fickell showed his mettle as a coach at Cincinnati, leading the Bearcats to the four-team playoff in 2021 when the program wasn’t in a power conference. It’s quite possible that with more NIL resources, he can get things turned around at Wisconsin.
After all, as Indiana just showed, nothing in this sport is ever out of the realm of possibility.