Indiana caps perfect season with 27-21 title win over Miami

Fernando Mendoza lowered his pads into a defender, spun in a full circle, used his hand to keep his balance, then launched himself horizontally and reached the ball over the goal line — an Indiana touchdown and a ready-made poster pic for a title run straight from the movies.

Maybe they’ll call it “Hoosiers.”

The Heisman Trophy winner’s touchdown Monday night put an exclamation point on a 27-21 win over Miami that closed out an undefeated season and brought an improbable — maybe impossible? — national championship to a program that had known nothing but losing and indifference for almost 140 years.

“Let me tell you: We won the national championship at Indiana University. It can be done,” said coach Curt Cignetti, who took over a program with a nation-leading 713 losses and turned it into the game’s biggest winner in the span of two years.

Mendoza helped get the Hoosiers over the line. He finished with 186 yards passing, but it was that tackle-breaking, sprawled-out 12-yard touchdown run on fourth-and-4 with 9:18 left that defined this game — and the Hoosiers’ season.

Mendoza’s play could very well join John Elway’s “helicopter” run in Super Bowl 32 as one of the greatest examples of a quarterback willing to put everything on the line to win it all. Mendoza might soon have something else in common with Elway: This game did little to diminish his projection as the first pick in the upcoming NFL draft.

Mendoza’s TD gave Indiana a 24-14 lead — barely enough breathing room to hold off a frenzied charge by the hard-hitting Hurricanes — a team that barely made the College Football Playoff and barely showed up in the first half of the final before coming to life behind 112 yards and two scores from Mark Fletcher.

The CFP trophy now heads to the most unlikely of places: Bloomington, Indiana — home of the college that famously boasts the most living alumni (805,000), including billionaire Mark Cuban and several thousand of his closest friends who packed Miami’s home stadium and turned a title-game ticket into a $4,000-or-more splurge.

Indiana finished 16-0 — using the extra games afforded by the expanded 12-team playoff to match a perfect-season win total last compiled by Yale in 1894. 

In a fitting bit of symmetry, this undefeated title comes 50 years after Bob Knight’s basketball team went 32-0 to win it all in that state’s favorite sport.

That hasn’t happened since, and there’s already some thought that college football — in its evolving, money-soaked, name-image-likeness era — might not see a team like this again, either.



(AP Photo Marta Lavandier)