The Last College Football Post of the Season

If it felt like the biggest moment in the 2025 college football season when it happened, in retrospect, it was even bigger, the one preserving the Indiana Hoosiers’ immaculate season, helping to ensure they would become the first and only other team in the sport to finish 16-0 since Yale in 1894 when the Bulldogs walloped the likes of Tufts, Trinity (CT), and the Volunteer (NY) Athletic Association. Trailing Penn State on the road by four points with 36 seconds left and facing 3rd and goal, Indiana wide receiver Omar Cooper Jr. caught quarterback Fernando Mendoza’s game-winning touchdown pass in the back of the end zone, a prosaic description of a catch so remarkable that it truly sounded like Fox play-by-play announcer Gus Johnson had suddenly been confronted with a multitude of the heavenly host. It’s the most natural thing in the world to see such a thing and reactively declare, “That’s the greatest catch I’ve ever seen,” to reach for hyperbole first and let hindsight come later. The thing was, even in hindsight the play demanded hyperbole. He caught that? By managing to get both feet in bounds? While being (legally) pushed out of bounds by the defender? We live in an era of outrageous athleticism and specialized wide receiver gloves that have turned incredible one-handed catches into a dime a dozen, almost. No one, however, has done what Cooper did, in his unbelievable body control, seeming to levitate like Chow Yun-Fat and Zhang Ziyi atop the trees in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” 

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There has never been a college football season like 2025. I mean that literally. Indiana, the all-time losingest major CFB program entering the season, won its first national championship. In addition, 2025 marked the first one that schools were able to pay their players directly by allowing them to share in the revenue their feats of strength have been helping to generate for decades. It is unquestionable progress even if that progress has blurred the lines between college and professional football to virtually nothing as the ability to compensate players taken in tandem with the so-called transfer portal have in effect created something like unregulated free agency. And if that means modern college football often resembles the worst parts of the NBA, where transactions and front office maneuvering drive discourse more than the games themselves, you can’t be mad at the nominal student athletes. The powers-that-be have been reaping the profits and breaking their contracts for years; now, finally, the players are gettin’ theirs. 

The author, journalist, and all-around college football fanatic Michael Weinreb has frequently noted how the sport tends to reflect America, and so, it only makes sense that given how present-day America feels as if it is spinning off its axis, so, too, does college football. The season has become too long, conferences rarely make historical or geographic sense, and the whole enterprise increasingly feels as if we really are all just rooting for laundry. That axis-spinning sensation was only exacerbated by the second season of the 12-team playoff, one that has all but rendered conference championships moot as these nonsensical confederations are now so overcrowded a true round-robin format is often impossible, necessitating arcane tiebreakers. That is how a 7-5 Duke team played for the ACC title rather than 10-2 Miami, and though Duke subsequently won the conference championship in an upset over Virginia, Miami was, nevertheless, selected for the playoff, and advanced to the national championship game, while the ACC champs went to the Sun Bowl. Did you follow all that? (I did not even mention that Miami just signed Duke’s quarterback Darian Mensah from the transfer portal and that now Duke is suing Mensah for breaking his NIL contract and does Mensah still get to keep his ACC Championship ring?) 

Once, going to a bowl game was cause for celebration, but now these utterly unique postseason exhibitions are mere television inventory, consolation prizes some teams are not even interested in accepting. Both Iowa State and Kansas State said thanks but no thanks and when Notre Dame was not selected for the playoff, they declined a bowl game invitation too, leading so many who had spent the entire season framing it strictly through the prism of the playoff while reducing bowl games to gum on their shoe to hypocritically scold the Fighting Irish for treating bowl games the exact same way. As the idiom goes, pick a lane!

Notre Dame’s decision shone a harsh light on just how much the 12-team playoff has altered not just what is most important within the sport but everyone’s expectations surrounding it. Used to be, success in this sport could be more relative, which is one of the reasons I fell in love with it. Even though college football has 136 teams and only 12 slots to go around for its postseason tournament, the new mentality too often is playoff or bust, one intensified by revenue sharing and the transfer portal evening the playing field. Indeed, Indiana is Exhibit A. If the woebegone Hoosiers could flip the script in 2 years, why, so many teams no doubt wonder, can’t we do the same? It spurred a rash of mid-season coach firings, both bluebloods and non-bluebloods alike, and the market’s most desirable candidate, University of Mississippi head coach Lane Kiffin, was a social media savvy narcissist who was only too happy to play it up. More than the Heisman Trophy race, really, the Kiffin saga became the season’s ultimate subplot, effectively transforming him into the sport’s main character, right down to the end as his team made the playoff and the decision of whether he would stay or go (he went, taking the LSU job) took center stage. 

Ah, but that’s the thing about college football. Lane Kiffin might have been a black hole, but he could not swallow the sport, and though anyone who watched a Mississippi game during the season knew their success stemmed as much from their quarterback, the jauntily named Ferris State transfer Trinidad Chambliss, in their breathtaking Sugar Bowl quarterfinal clash with Georgia, Chambliss reclaimed the spotlight for his team as absolutely as the Virginia student body swarmed its field in the instantaneous aftermath of their beloved Cavaliers equally breathtaking (then) upset of Florida State in September. Chambliss had big numbers but more than that, he had big plays, reaching the quarterbacking zenith where the burden of what’s at stake surrenders to the joy of performance. The game went late into the January 1st night, awakening echoes of glorious New Years Days of old, and ended with what was tantamount to a Twilight Zone episode.

All the college football sickos who stayed up to watch the end of the Hawaii Bowl on Christmas Eve night, meanwhile, can provide the umpteenth reminder that something ostensibly meaningless can feel like nothing in the world matters more, and the though Indiana and Ohio State 1 versus 2 B1G title tilt was just a prelude to the playoff and not an (un)officially designated Game of the Century, it felt like a Game of the Century, nevertheless. I wouldn’t have thought it could be topped, but the national championship game did, a title fight in which defenses owned the first half, forcing the offenses to up the ante up in a slobberknocker of a second half in which the referees essentially swallowed their whistles whole, living the ideal of Letting Them Play, and Indiana demonstrated true greatness by overcoming extraordinary pressure from a valiant Miami defense to find a way by playing how they had all season long – unafraid.

That fearlessness stemmed from head coach Curt Cignetti’s glowering bravado, but it also stemmed from the confident exuberance of Mendoza, and you saw both in the game’s biggest play when leading 17-14 early in the 4th quarter and facing a 4th down and 4 at Miami’s 12, Indiana eschewed settling for a field goal to have Mendoza run a delayed draw up the middle. Can you have your Heisman Moment after you have already won the Heisman? I guess so, because Mendoza did, as his 12-yard run to the promised land was like Willie Beamen’s run at the end of “Any Given Sunday” but if it had been done by a lanky quarterback from the 30s or 40s, like Sammy Baugh, the kind of gridiron maneuver that typically works best when you’re 9 years old and slaloming through imaginary defenders in your backyard. Instead, the Heisman Trophy winner manifested that imaginary play in real life. As he dove, stretching the ball across the goal line, it felt a lot like Omar Cooper Jr.’s catch back in November. There is so much outside noise in college football these days, but those few seconds when they were in the air, Mendoza and Cooper and the game itself seemed to hover above it, impervious.