Fernando Mendoza stood in the pocket at the national championship game and did the thing quarterbacks at that level almost never do under that kind of pressure: nothing extra. No forcing, no panic, no trying to be the story. He just executed. Indiana won. And Jabari Young, who joined me this week, said something about that moment I've been sitting with since we finished recording.
"He's the winner of the entire season."
Not the Heisman. Not the highest draft grade. The winner. Of the season. As in — forget the playoff bracket, forget the conference standings, forget all the programs with more resources and more history and more kids from four-star pipelines. Mendoza played four years of college football, got older than everyone else on the field, stayed poised, and the right situation found him. That's the whole story of Indiana this year, compressed into one quarterback.
But here's the thing Jabari and I kept circling that I don't think gets said clearly enough: Indiana didn't win by accident. They won by making a bet nobody else wanted to make. They built a roster of experienced players — average age 23, older than most of the guys across the line from them by two or three years — and they ran a system that didn't make mistakes while everyone else did. That's not luck. That's a philosophy. And it happens to be a philosophy that most programs, most NFL front offices, and most operators in any industry resist because it's unglamorous and it requires admitting that experience beats raw talent more often than we're comfortable acknowledging.
The age advantage everyone keeps calling unfair
The number that keeps coming back to me from this conversation is 23. Indiana's average roster age, across a national championship run.
I got drafted at 21, turning 22. I was going up against veterans who had two, three years of NFL film on me, two or three years of reading defenses and understanding leverage and knowing where the ball was going before it left the quarterback's hand. The physical gap closes faster than people think — the experience gap doesn't close at all until you've actually accumulated the experience. You can't fake reps.
So when Indiana lines up a 23-year-old against a 19-year-old, that's not a gimmick. That's a three-year head start on understanding the game. And at the college level, where the physical gap is real but not as decisive as the pro level, experience becomes the variable that separates who makes mistakes and who doesn't. Indiana capitalized on other people's mistakes all season. That's what Jabari pointed out and what I think is worth sitting with: the team that doesn't make mistakes doesn't have to be more talented. They just have to not lose the game.
The caveat — and I said this to Jabari and I'll say it here — is that what Indiana did may not be fully sustainable in the same form. COVID red-shirt years created an unusual stockpile of eligible older players. That pipeline thins out. The average age of 23 is a specific historical condition as much as it's a program philosophy. But the underlying principle survives even if the exact mechanism doesn't: find your edge, build around experience where experience is the deciding variable, and execute without mistakes while everyone else tries to be spectacular.
Why Miami is actually the other winner
Jabari made the case for Miami being the real program winner of this season, and I think he's right in a way that doesn't undercut Indiana.
Indiana won the championship. Miami proved they're back. Those are two different kinds of winning, and both matter — they just matter to different people for different reasons.
For a recruit sitting in his living room in the spring, watching film and thinking about where to commit, what Miami did this season is more persuasive than the final score. They showed up to the national championship game. They played a poised, well-executed game until an interception on a high coverage read ended their drive. They had Ray Lewis on the sideline and Michael Irvin on the sideline, and they walked away disappointed, which means they walked away expecting to be there. That's a different posture than a program that's satisfied to make the playoff.
The recruiting pitch writes itself now. Miami doesn't have to tell you they're back. They can show you the tape from January.
I had Miami in my top five coming out of high school. I chose not to go there — they didn't have engineering, which ended the conversation for me — but I understood the pull. South Beach, the city, the history, the chain of guys who came through that program and made it to the league. The question I'd ask now, and the question every recruit should ask, is what version of yourself gets built in that environment? And more specifically: who are the people in that building with you?
PULL QUOTE: "Fernando Mendoza, no matter what happens, is going to be a star in Indiana. There's not any place that he can't go because of what he just gave that state." — Jabari Young
The thing I'd tell Mendoza right now
Jabari asked me directly how I'd advise someone in Mendoza's position — national champion, projected top pick, NIL money coming, decision window opening on whether to stay in college or go pro.
My honest answer starts before any of those decisions. Before you decide on the draft. Before you negotiate the NIL. Before the agents start calling and the advisors start presenting and the family starts having opinions about the opinions.
The first conversation is: what is your actual North Star?
Not the version you tell the press. The version you'd tell one person at 2 AM. Because that answer determines everything downstream. If the North Star is maximizing career earnings over a decade, the draft calculus looks one way. If it's building a legacy in Indiana the way I built one in Nebraska — where I can walk into a town and people know who I am, where Warren Buffett became a relationship because of where I played college football — then the calculus looks completely different. You might not be maximizing NFL contract value. You might be maximizing something more durable.
I brought my sister in on my marketing deals from day one. People ask about that — it's a trend now, having family as part of your business structure — and my answer is always the same: I don't care who the person is, I care whether they have the expertise and can execute. My sister earned her piece because she came in with real experience, actual skills, and the ability to build relationships that compounded over years. She also happens to be able to humble me in ways an outside agent can't. That's underrated. When you're 22 and you've just won a national championship, you need someone in the room who isn't intimidated by you.
For Mendoza, that person — whoever they are, family or not — needs to be identified before the signing bonus clears.
The Lane Kiffin question and what it actually reveals
We spent time on Lane Kiffin's move to LSU, and Jabari was skeptical in a way I found honest. His argument: everywhere Kiffin goes there's promise that doesn't fully materialize into titles, and LSU with its resources and expectations might just be a bigger stage for the same outcome.
I pushed back, and I'll push back here too — but not for the reasons you'd expect. The Jimbo Fisher comparison is fair as a pattern-matching exercise. Big hire, big expectations, disappointing results at Texas A&M. But I think what happened at Ole Miss actually does matter. Kiffin took a program that had no business competing for top recruits against Alabama and Georgia and made them relevant. He did that with fewer resources, in a harder conference, against higher-ranked competition. That's the version of the resume that should matter when you're deciding whether to give him LSU.
The counterpoint, which Jabari landed cleanly: Indiana just proved that resources and brand don't guarantee outcomes. If Indiana can win a national championship, what's the excuse for Ole Miss not winning one if the coach is as good as his reputation? And that's a harder question to dismiss.
What I actually think this debate is about isn't Kiffin specifically. It's about whether college football is settling into a new reality where the gap between elite programs and everyone else is determined by system and development rather than raw recruiting rankings. If Indiana's blueprint holds — if what they did is repeatable in structure even if not in the exact conditions — then the argument for giving a coach like Kiffin a resources upgrade gets more complicated, not less. Because the edge was never just the resources.
What I'd actually do with the three decisions this episode raised
Three things, in order:
- If you're Mendoza's advisor, the first meeting is about values, not money. Sit down with him and close family before any agent, any NIL deal, any press conversation about the draft. Walk through what he actually wants from the next decade, not the next season. The money will be significant either way — NFL contract or continued NIL at a program that just won a championship. What won't be the same is which path builds the relationships and the legacy that compounds past his playing days. Nebraska built me things I still use. I wouldn't trade that for a marginally earlier draft slot. He should understand that version of the calculation before he chooses.
- If you're Indiana's AD, the conversation with Curt Signetti isn't just about the contract extension. The $93 million over eight years is necessary but not sufficient. What keeps a coach who just became a legend at a program that wasn't supposed to be a destination school? It's the sense that he's building something permanent — that his name is on the building, that his grandkids have a relationship with the institution, that his legacy is physically embedded in the place. The money says we value you. The legacy infrastructure says we want you to be this place forever. You need both conversations, and most ADs only have one.
- If you're watching NIL from the outside and waiting for clarity, stop waiting. Jabari's right that it's the Wild West and Congress hasn't sorted it out. That's also the part nobody says plainly: the programs winning right now are winning because they stopped waiting for the rules to clarify and started optimizing within whatever the current rules allow. Indiana didn't pause their roster strategy while the NCAA figured out transfer portal eligibility windows. They built what the rules permitted and executed it better than everyone else. The clarity isn't coming before the opportunity passes. The programs that act now — on player development philosophy, on NIL structure, on what kind of coach they're building around — will be the ones who look prescient in five years when the rules do finally settle.
Indiana gave us something rare this season: a blueprint that looks obvious in retrospect and still won't be copied widely because the copying requires admitting you were wrong about what mattered.
Most programs won't admit that. That's the edge.