On Monday night in Miami Gardens, the Indiana University Hoosiers and the University of Miami Hurricanes will play for the 2025 college football national championship. If you’re even remotely plugged into the American sporting landscape, you may experience a strange ringing in your ears or a metallic taste in your mouth while reading “Indiana University and the University of Miami” and “national championship” in close proximity. This is not an unreasonable reaction!
You know that inconvenient phenomenon, the one where we’ve all been so histrionic about things that don’t really matter for so long that when actual landscape-obliterating events take place, language falls short to describe it? Right, so that’s also happening in college football. But just this once, when you hear stentorian announcers with a hastily baked-on spray tan intone about THIS HISTORIC MATCHUP? On Monday night, they’ll be making a rare point.
The paths these programs pursued went from unlikely to ludicrous this season, crossed some kind of international dateline of believability, and now threaten to defy belief even when presented as plainly as possible. But let me take a shot anyway, just for giggles:
The Hurricanes you’re surely familiar with. Miami has one national title to their name this millennium, but that was all the way back in 2001—before any of their current players were born. That team is one you’ve probably seen on many greatest-of-all-time lists, but the Canes’ real glory days were the late ’80s and early ’90s, when they notched three national titles in five years.
Before the 2024 team began its run to the playoffs, Indiana football had been to just five postseason games this millennium, and lost them all. The 2024 team won 11 regular-season games for the first time in school history (there had only ever been two nine-win seasons before that, and we’re talking about a team that played its first football game in 1887), but extended that postseason losing streak, crashing out in the first round of the playoffs against Notre Dame.
Indiana’s two victories in the Rose and Peach Bowls this season have doubled the number of postseason wins in program history. Prior to this season, their last postseason win came in 1991. Again, this is a program that started playing in 1887. If our collective tendency towards hyperbole has drained words like “historic” of meaning, you might say Monday night’s game is here to give it back. (Here’s a trivia tidbit you’re about to hear a lot: Thanks to playoff expansion, a win on Monday would make Indiana the first 16-0 top-division team since Yale in 1894. North Dakota State also went 16-0 in 2019, but they are an FCS team, and that number is boosted by playing four playoff games.)
The 2024 Hoosiers were still a good story despite flaming out short of the finish line, and a feel-good story too. They notched a notable achievement in college football, where Cinderellas are generally treated with scorn. The 2025 Hoosiers are … a different kind of fairytale. One with a monster in it. This Indiana team’s average margin of victory is more than four touchdowns. They field the nation’s #2 scoring offense, and the #2 scoring defense. They are responsible for the greatest single play of the year, and quarterback Fernando Mendoza brought home the school’s first Heisman Trophy last month. They have been, in every sense of the word, superlative. The Est-est team.
If Indiana’s dominance has been somehow both shocking and inevitable, Miami has made the trek to the title game under a perpetual cloud of suspicion, one almost entirely of their own making. Skidding in as the 10th seed, there were strenuous (and well-founded) arguments against handing them a playoff bid at all. Like a lot of modern Miami teams, they are stacked with talent, frequently sloppy, awash in penalties, and prone to occasional bursts of turnovers at the foot-shootingest possible times. They also put most of their ACC schedule in a headlock, and ripped through a truly impressive slate of postseason wins (Texas A&M, Ohio State, and Ole Miss) to get here.
You probably don’t need to be told that pitting Indiana against Miami constitutes a high-magnitude culture clash, but the winning edge might not lie where you think. Indiana fans, not nationally known for being particularly rabid outside of basketball season, traveled in vast hordes to both Pasadena and Atlanta. (The game taking place in Miami is a happy coincidence for the Canes, by the way; the title game rotates among a handful of stadiums. Looking at the current weather report for Bloomington, the Hoosiers probably aren’t mad about it either.)
The teams themselves might find more to talk about. Their styles differ slightly; their cussedness does not. And if there’s one element common to both of these unlikely runs, it’s this: Both squads know very well what they do and don’t do, and have the resumes to back up their deep commitment to specific bits. If nothing happens for a quarter, well, they’re going to stick to the plan: Miami will run straight at you until you cry, and Indiana will poke and poke until they find the weak spot in your armor.
Indiana wants to run the ball and exploit “every inch of grass“ through the pass game. This is what most teams say they’d like to do. Indiana actually does it. The game plan has not changed for the entire season, and really shouldn’t: Two running backs rotating in the backfield behind a precision-engineered offensive line, receivers capable of stretching the field horizontally or vertically, and a quarterback capable of making every throw required. (The back-shoulder throw Mendoza deploys is, by the way, a thing of pure art.)
Miami won’t change anything, either. They got this far by the grace of a kaiju-class pair of edge rushers in Akheem Mesidor and Rueben Bain Jr., and by whittling down their offensive machine to include only the parts that work. A huge offensive line plays the cudgel. Wide receiver/punt returner/wildcat QB/all-purpose menace Malachi Toney is the scalpel, lining up all over the field hoping to break one tackle and score. Carson Beck, when playing as his truest self, makes three plays a game no one in their right mind would expect him to make. (Whether these plays will benefit Miami or Indiana is something we all get to find out together.)
One final stat to ponder: While time of possession doesn’t always directly correlate with victory, it does hint at something about a team’s general disposition. Miami and Indiana rank fifth and sixth nationally in T.O.P., indicating yet another similarity: They both prefer to dictate pace. Which boa constrictor can swallow more of the other first? What better place than South Florida to find out?
Neither of these teams were supposed to be here, is the thing. Indiana’s being led by a guy with a Grinch-putty face in his second year, who brought in a load-bearing swath of his previous roster from James Madison University, plucked a transfer quarterback from Cal, and proceeded to beat the daylights out of blue-chip units with better pedigrees and bigger stadiums. Miami was not only a long shot to make the playoffs in the first place, they didn’t even make their own conference championship game. It’s the greatest gift we could’ve asked for, this final matchup: Something nobody saw coming. There really is no losing proposition on the table here for the audience, only the question of whether we’re about to witness the first brick in the foundation of a new Midwest empire or the resurrection of a familiar tropical dynasty.
It might seem like a foregone conclusion, and maybe it is—the heavily-favored Indiana might treat Miami like they’ve treated their last two postseason opponents—but: The Hoosiers themselves would be the first to tell you what they think of relying on what’s “supposed” to happen.