Indiana's on the brink of a GOAT case, plus 8 wild portal updates
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Good morning. Two years ago, a 3-9 Indiana lost to a 4-8 Purdue. Two months ago, Miami ranked No. 18. Today, those are the two best teams. Keep going, huh?
🏆 Playoff Stuff: Indiana — Indiana! — is a feral 15-0
Last night, here in Atlanta, the first snap was a D’Angelo Ponds pick-six of Dante Moore, Oregon’s potential No. 1 NFL Draft pick. For only a few drives after that did it feel like the No. 5 Ducks had a chance, and this is the latest surreal thing I’ve typed this season about No. 1 Indiana. (“Cinderella wears combat boots,” wrote David Ubben beside me.)
More surreality: The fourth quarter began with about 65,000 Hoosiers belting “Mr. Brightside,” then raging at the refs over two iffy decisions while their coach glowered on the sideline — with the score 42-15 in their favor.
Their team soon blocked a punt, then kept scoring. The final: 56-22, but if JMU’s garbage-time points against Oregon don’t count, then the Orange Bowl-champion Ducks had merely one touchdown last night. Afterward, Curt Cignetti grabbed ESPN’s mic and led more singing. That time, the fight song.
From bell to bell, from the winning sideline to the imported home crowd, that was the most bloodthirsty football I’ve ever seen, and I was in the same Peach Bowl seat when 2019 LSU did similar things to Oklahoma. I consider those Tigers one of the two best teams ever, so “bloodthirsty” was a carefully chosen word. (I also didn’t know until after I’d typed this that Greg McElroy was comparing Indiana to LSU during last night’s broadcast.)
In what was surely both the largest-ever gathering of Hoosiers fans and the loudest-ever Atlanta sporting event (other than MLS and pro wrestling), one of the best stories in football history revealed something else: This team is one win in (and against) Miami from having a case to be considered the best team in college football history. Indiana! Three bowl wins in the last century-plus, then two in this month!
We’ll see how the criteria stack up, if the Hoosiers become major college football’s first 16-0 team since 1894 Yale (which played several FCS-equivalent teams, mind you). We’ll also have to translate 2025 into pre-2020s terms, but we’ve been debating which team from which era is the GOAT for decades now anyway, so whatever.
For now, the Hoosiers have beaten Oregon, Ohio State, Alabama and Oregon again, the latter two by a combined 94-25. The Ducks and Buckeyes went 25-1 against non-Indiana teams — and Indiana might still beat the only other team that beat the Buckeyes.
Big Ten title. Rose Bowl title. Cherub of a quarterback whose Heisman is on his LinkedIn. National title shot. Currently winning the freaking portal! The question isn’t when there will be a movie about this team, but how many …
… if it finishes the job on Jan. 19 in what Stewart Mandel calls “the most unique championship in college football history.” Two nights ago in the Fiesta, the Canes played penalty-laden football (that could’ve included one more penalty) and still put away an Ole Miss team powered by the electric Trinidad Chambliss and bonded by Lane Kiffin spite.
Since September, Miami’s front seven has been my favorite cluster of players anywhere, and its offensive skill talent is as fun as anybody’s. Unless 7.5-point BetMGM favorite Indiana gets rattled for the first time all season, the national title could come down to whether Carson Beck is First 57 Minutes Against Ole Miss Carson Beck or Last Three Minutes Against Ole Miss Carson Beck.
In just about any other season, the most amazing story would be the team that was toyed with for a month by the committee and then not allowed to play in its conference’s title game, but will nevertheless play for the natty in its own stadium.
But damn, Indiana’s got a piece of even that story, as Fernando Mendoza was once a Miami two-star who didn’t draw any noteworthy interest from the Canes.
Ralph Russo’s early title preview. Onward to … oh right, the other huge thing going on.
🌀 Portal Season: New wrinkles all the time
Though the transfer portal has been around since 2018 and NIL since 2021, it’s easy to forget how untested so many of college sports’ ever-evolving boundaries are.
Combine that with 2026 only having a single portal window, meaning every team is trying to crash-course the same test at once, and we’ve had a bounty of transfer stories that make you say, “Well, you don’t see that every day.”
At the portal halfway point, an incomplete ranking of the past week’s stories by how far they’ve raised my eyebrows:
8. A player (Ole Miss’ Chambliss) being denied another year of eligibility by the NCAA isn’t that novel. But that happening hours after he played in a semifinal during the portal period? Novel. The Rebels are appealing it.
7. The roommate of likely the highest-paid college athlete ever is transferring from Texas to archrival Oklahoma even though said roommate is still around.
6. A breadcrumbs trail: Auburn’s ex-Oklahoma QB is headed to UNLV after UNLV’s ex-Virginia QB publicly committed to stay, then left for Nebraska, whose anticipated Notre Dame QB transfer instead went to Kentucky. Meanwhile, Kentucky’s old QB is at Arizona State, while Arizona State’s is in the middle of visiting a variety of places, including Kentucky.
5. As discussed on Tuesday, a walk-on North Texas QB reportedly signed a $7.5 million Oklahoma State deal 365 days after his first college start.
4. A head coach whose nickname is “the Portal King” left a semifinals run for a richer program, and so far, the only transaction between his current and former rosters went against him.
3. Washington’s QB signed a deal to stick around, announced he was leaving and then announced he’s sticking around. There was lawyer stuff in the middle, along with Washington hosting Missouri’s ex-Penn State QB.
2. The player involved in a groundbreaking legal showdown with Georgia over his transfer to Missouri last year … has re-entered the portal. No notes.
1. “Brendan Sorsby, ranked No. 1 in The Athletic’s transfer quarterback rankings, transferred to Texas Tech earlier this week with one season remaining on a multi-year revenue sharing agreement with Cincinnati that includes .”
I’m sure I’m forgetting several recent head-turners and flabbergasters. Amid all that, former Florida five-star QB DJ Lagway maybe visiting other schools after having committed to his father’s former Baylor Bears just feels like a run-of-the-mill update. That’s still really consequential!
Here’s the updated tracker on where the 30 best transfer quarterbacks have wound up so far. One of the best still available: Nebraska’s former QB, the one whose uncle was a coach on his Huskers team’s staff and whose younger brother had been committed as well. Should I add this to the new-wrinkles list above?
More portal: The best under-the-radar transfers so far. Excitement about Wisconsin’s offense! Yet another new wrinkle!
Quick Snaps
🗣️ SEC, does it still just mean more?
📰 Non-portal, non-Playoff news:
- The NFL Draft early-entrants list now includes Alabama QB Ty Simpson and three possible top-10 picks from Ohio State.
- Jason Witten (Tennessee, the Dallas Cowboys) is becoming the tight ends coach at Oklahoma. His son, five-star linebacker Cooper Witten, has an OU offer.
🍨 Bowl game TV ratings looked nice yet again, even setting several records (albeit under Nielsen’s newly sports-friendly system).
🧟♂️ “Everything is the death of college football until it isn’t.” I adore that headline. Did you know we’re 130 years into people claiming the latest change is gonna be what destroys this sport? As Rodger Sherman wrote a year ago: Try as sinister forces might, “They can’t make college football suck.” Ask Atlanta’s sea of hungover Indianans.