The Cinderella story is complete: the losingest team in college football history at the beginning of the 2024 season has just won the National Championship, defeating the University of Miami 27 – 21. I won’t recap the game: you can read any number of stories, all of which include some version of “The Call of the Game:”

Indiana might not have won by 30, the way it did in previous playoff victories. But the Hoosiers played with the same confident flair, punctuated by the call of the game: On fourth-and-4 from the Miami 12 and the Hoosiers up three points, Cignetti called a quarterback run for Fernando Mendoza. He pushed up the middle and bullied his way through the Miami defense, busting multiple tackles to stretch over the goal line.

That play summed up the season: Cignetti banking on himself and his players and Mendoza delivering in the clutch. – Andrea Adelson, ESPN, January 20, 2026

As I wrote on Sunday, I was rooting for Indiana. It’s a feel-good, fairy-tale story that you don’t get very often.  Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza is an outspoken believer and a team player: “I went 98 yards with my boys,” is how he described the game-winning drive when Cal beat Stanford in 2024.

Here are a few takeaways:

• Don’t let the past define you.
• Transformation can occur.
• Don’t underestimate the importance of discipline and unity

This IU team also embodies a basic human hope: The hope that we can overcome doubt (whether ours or others’) and make something of ourselves – the hope that we can enter the lists of life and prevail – the hope that a band of brothers, disciplined and united, can win out. – a school headmaster (quoted in my January 18 blog)

“A band of brothers, disciplined and united, can win out.” This was echoed by Jason Gay in the Wall Street Journal:

[Coach] Cignetti’s gotten a lot of attention for his bravado and his menacing sideline presence, in which he paces and stares like a customer who thinks the butcher’s hiding the best T-bones. He’s as amusing a character as the sports world has these days, but the jokes and memes may have obscured how good a coach he is, how his Hoosiers played disciplined, complete team football, and topped it off with a jewel thief’s nerves. – Jason Gay, WSJ, January 20, emphasis mine

And I would add, selfless. When asked to comment on his touchdown run, Mendoza said, “I would die for this team.”

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified. (1 Corinthians 9.24 – 27, ESV)

PS Miami fought hard and were within a couple of plays of pulling out a victory at the end. Miami played with discipline and purpose. Their quarterback, Carson Beck, is also an outspoken believer although I was a bit disappointed that he didn’t seem to hang around after the game to shake hands with anyone. A Miami victory, however, would not have brought the same fairy-tale finish as the Indiana victory. I’m glad Indiana won.