Is Indiana cheating? Is it a conspiracy? No, the Hoosiers are just that good

When a phenomenon like Indiana football happens, our natural impulse is to scramble for an explanation.

How did Curt Cignetti do this so quickly at a dormant program where nobody ever conceived of such possibilities? Why do the normal rules of building championship teams suddenly not apply?

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We want it to make sense. We want to know the secret. We want to know if Cignetti possesses some kind of football Rosetta Stone that nobody else in the sport’s 155-year history has figured out.

And the lack of an answer is breaking people’s brains. It’s even gotten to the point where innuendo about cheating — with absolutely no evidence, mind you — has taken hold on social media and even among a subset of athletic administrators who are convinced something nefarious must be going on at Indiana even if they can’t identify it.

But what if the actual answer to Indiana football being on the precipice of a 16-0 national championship season is that there’s no answer? What if it’s one of those accidents of history where everything aligned just the right way both with Cignetti’s arrival at Indiana and in college football more broadly to open the door for a traditional have-not? What if Indiana beats Miami on Monday night and the conclusion to the story, as we all scramble to put it in perspective, is that this was a one-of-a-kind moment that can’t be replicated and exists forever as a sports anomaly that can’t be properly analyzed?

“It’s been kind of surreal, but you get it done with the right people, properly led,” Cignetti said Monday. “We’ve been fortunate to have great staff continuity, and then down in the locker room we’ve got a lot of older guys that have high character, great leadership traits. They’re very consistent, day in and day out, in terms of being committed and working hard to improvement and being able to enter every Saturday prepared with the right mindset and then putting it on the field. It’s all about people, and you’ve got to have a blueprint and a plan. There’s no question about it, that’s what’s gotten us to this point.”

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That’s not a very fulfilling answer because it’s the same stuff most coaches say about their programs, even the ones that aren’t coming close to national titles. If it’s just Cignetti being better than his peers at the nuts and bolts of coaching, it’s almost an indictment of every coach and every downtrodden program that couldn’t pull off anything close to this.

And it’s probably why the conspiracy brains are having a field day with Indiana right now. They just can’t conceive that a team without an Alabama, Ohio State or any other blue-blooded logo on their helmet could actually be this good.

The narrative pivot from “This Indiana story is wild!” to “They gotta be cheatin’, Paul!” really ramped up as Indiana completed its 56-22 blowout over Oregon in the semifinals — a game that began with cornerback D’Angelo Ponds reading the first play from scrimmage as if he knew exactly what was coming. No sooner had Ponds jumped the route, snagged the interception and taken it into the end zone for a pick 6 that the theories started to fly on social media.

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Were they stealing signs? Did Indiana find a way to hack into opponents’ computer systems to download their game plans and practice film? Did a spy get into Oregon’s headsets?

Not only is such wide-ranging espionage improbable based on the security measures teams take to protect their online databases, it’s also unoriginal. Even as the Connor Stalions sign-stealing scandal unfolded at Michigan two years ago, the more mythical claims about what he did turned out to be a James Bond fantasy.

Yes, Stalions went to great lengths to illegally scout opponents in person, violating NCAA rules, but it got a little silly when paranoia about hacking into the Catapult system to steal practice footage began to infect multiple programs. Alabama wouldn’t even let players watch film individually on their iPads leading into the Rose Bowl that year. It reached a point Catapult had to come out and say publicly there was no evidence of any security breaches.

Similarly, there’s no indication whatsoever of any evidence that would discredit Indiana’s success. Those theories appear to be the product of disbelief that the Hoosiers could really be this good — especially when they often talk about how little they practice relative to other teams. (Cignetti has famously been a proponent of short, high-intensity practices, coming in well short of the 20 hours per week allowed by NCAA rules.)

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In these situations, though, it’s often helpful to apply Occam’s Razor, a philosophical principle that the simplest explanation for something tends to be the right one. Is it more likely that Cignetti’s 26-2 record at Indiana is the product of a vast conspiracy or that a coach who has won big at D-II, the FCS and then the Sun Belt got to the Big Ten and continued winning with a group of players that was far more talented than anyone understood?

Yes, the Hoosiers are benefitting from the presence of several seniors and fifth-year players in key positions (but so are a lot of programs). Yes, Mark Cuban and other billionaire Indiana alums have invested in NIL and roster-funding (donors tend to get excited when you win).

If you want to knock Indiana for that, go ahead. But you who know else used the formula of veteran-laden team and expensive roster to win a national championship? That would be Ohio State last year. And probably every national champion over the next several years. This isn’t groundbreaking stuff.

Sorry to break it to you, but the real secret is no secret: Even though Indiana doesn’t have the five-star recruits that have traditionally been the foundation of almost every championship team in history, Cignetti has managed to construct a team without a weakness.

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What’s the best part of Indiana’s team — the offense or defense? What position group can you attack? It’s hard to say because nobody has really identified something to pick on. The Hoosiers have proven the ability to win a tough, line-of-scrimmage game against the best in the country or they can win a shootout with the potential No. 1 overall draft pick in Fernando Mendoza handing off to future draft pick Roman Hemby and throwing to three future NFL receivers in Omar Cooper, Elijah Sarratt and Charlie Becker.

Oh, and Indiana has projected mid-round draft picks all over its defense, leads the nation in turnover margin and gets flagged for the second-fewest penalty yards in the country.

It’s quite a normal way to construct a great team. It just happened at a place that isn’t normal, and it happened at warp speed because Cignetti was able to bring some key pieces of his success at James Madison via the transfer portal. Ponds is a great example: A three-star recruit, largely because he’s a 5-foot-9 corner rather than a 6-foot-2 corner, was awesome as a freshman at James Madison and has continued to be awesome for two years at Indiana.

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And especially now, as the more pedigreed programs struggle with continuity and building depth in the traditional way by stacking recruiting classes, it makes sense that college football would stumble into an atypical champion that has talent, experience, continuity and great coaching.

Does that sound like a conspiracy or a lightning strike? If Cignetti had been hired at Alabama instead of Indiana two years ago and built out his roster the exact same way, is there any doubt the Crimson Tide would be playing for a national title right now without all the handwringing about whether there’s more to the story?

Instead, it’s happening at Indiana. College football has never been set up for a program to flip overnight from a total loser into a national champion, and it’s driving some folks insane to watch the Hoosiers become one of the more dominant playoff teams we’ve ever seen.

But a lottery ticket hits somewhere every day in America. If this is indeed Indiana’s time, there probably isn’t much more to it than what the Hoosiers have shown us for the last 15 weeks.