For years, the conversation in Indiana college football started and ended with Notre Dame. If a team from the state was going to chase a national title, the Irish were the obvious answer.
That old assumption took a hit when Notre Dame beat Indiana 27-17 in the first round of the 2024 College Football Playoff. Since then, Curt Cignetti has turned the sport on its head, and the ripple effect has changed the balance of power inside the state.
Indiana’s rise reached another level this summer, when an IU football bus drove through South Bend carrying the national championship trophy to the school’s satellite campus. The Hoosiers had already become impossible to ignore, and that moment made the point even louder.
Their reach is showing up everywhere, including on the recruiting trail. In the last week alone, two major Notre Dame targets chose Indiana: in-state 5-star wide receiver Monshun Sales and 2028 4-star quarterback Lukas Prock.
Marcus Freeman has done plenty to strengthen Notre Dame’s standing. He’s the most promising Irish coach since Lou Holtz, has already taken his team to a national title game, and has Notre Dame sitting in the 2026 preseason top-5. But even with that résumé, he’s still dealing with IU’s sudden pull in a way nobody expected.
Freeman didn’t dance around it when asked on ESPN’s First Take this week.
“I don’t love that being up the road like four hours,” Freeman said on ESPN’s First Take this week. “I mean, we got to make sure that we’re putting our program in position to do that.”
He also made clear just how far Indiana’s breakthrough has reached.
“Indiana’s a national champion. Like, think about what we’re saying. Indiana football is a national champion of college football,” Freeman said.
“That program. Like, nobody would have said that two years ago.
Nobody would have thought about it. And it doesn’t happen by luck.
It’s work that’s put in.
“You got to take your hat off and give credit where credit’s due. And a lot of credit is owed to that program.”
For a long time, Indiana sat in the shadow of Notre Dame, along with Ohio State and Michigan, the regional powers that kept the Hoosiers buried. Freeman, an Ohio native who played at Ohio State, knows that landscape well.
Now the script has changed. Indiana is the model everyone points to. And Notre Dame, even with its own momentum, is the program trying to keep pace with the team up the road.
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Indianas recruiting run under Curt Cignetti keeps adding layers, and the latest one comes from the quarterback position. Lukas Prock, a four-star prospect in the 2028 cycle, has already chosen the Hoosiers, a sign that the programs rise is resonating well beyond the current roster and into the next wave of talent.
Procks decision also says plenty about how Indiana is being viewed right now. He bought into the long-term stability around Cignetti and the idea that the standard in Bloomington can hold even as players come and go, which is exactly the message the staff has been trying to sell while stacking more high-profile additions in the classes ahead. [Read more 🡒]
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His biggest showing came in a runaway win over the U.S. Virgin Islands, when he poured in 32 points and kept flashing the sort of versatility that made him such a prized recruit in the first place. For Indiana, that is the encouraging part: Karvala does not look like a long-term project, but a freshman who may be ready to matter right away when the college season opens. [Read more 🡒]