College sports is now in an era where anything seems possible

Prior to the start of the 2025 college football season, no major program had taken more losses than Indiana. Northwestern stole that distinction during the year, but it was true as of when everyone had 0-0 records to begin the year.

Naturally, all the Hoosiers did was become the first team since the late 1800s to go 16-0, winning the program’s first national championship.

It’s obvious that not all FBS teams have realistic shots at the title. You can dredge up the 1984 BYU Cougars if you must, but really only power conference teams are going to pull it off. And even then, not all power conference teams can do it.

Or so it seemed, anyway. If you’d asked anyone three years ago, they’d have put IU in the group of P4 programs that couldn’t actually win it all. But, they just won it all. And to add a little emphasis, this was the same regular season in which Vanderbilt went 10-2 and had the Heisman runner up to Indiana’s winner. Anything is possible.

It is important to keep some perspective, though. Indiana should get a tremendous amount of credit as legitimately one of if not the best team of the season. We all know, though, that the best team doesn’t always win it all. Infinite kudos to Curt Cignetti and his staff for getting the team up for every game.

But also, the size of the Playoff skews perspective a bit. The Hoosiers probably weren’t as good as 2019 LSU or 2020 Alabama, and, adjusted for time period, possibly not as good as 1995 Nebraska or 2001 Miami (FL) either. However, Indiana just went 16-0, and none of those other teams did because they couldn’t, because at least in the 15-0 Tigers’ case, they didn’t play a road game at Hawaii to get an extra match on the year. The others fell three (Bama) or four (NU and UM) games short of getting a chance to hit 16-0.

Because the Playoff is mostly stocked with the best teams of any given season, we will marvel at the difficulty of the path the champion took to get the trophy. Keep in mind, though, that it’s a tournament, and someone has to win it all. That someone is all but guaranteed to play three other really tough teams in succession, and maybe four depending on the draw.

Think of it this way. If you and a friend are battling to guess coin flips correctly, where one has to pick heads and the other tails, you will almost certainly never win 12 times in a row. There’s a 1-in-4096 chance of you doing that, and the two of you won’t sit there flipping that dang coin for long enough to do that.

But if you set up a 12-round coin flipping tournament with 4,096 competitors, you’re guaranteed to see someone win a flip against a competitor a dozen times in a row. It absolutely will happen.

It works the same way in college football, in that you won’t see someone beat three top ten teams in a row in the regular season — not that many teams get to try — but will basically every year in the Playoff. Something that use to feel impossible will become commonplace.

That said, if you have only paid attention to football, you may not know that something that is shaking the very foundation of college sports is happening over in men’s basketball.

You probably knew that the aforementioned Heisman finalist at Vanderbilt, Diego Pavia, had to sue the NCAA to be able to play this season. He did so on the argument that his years of playing JUCO ball shouldn’t have counted towards his years of NCAA eligibility. That case is still ongoing, as merely an injunction and not an actual win allowed Pavia to compete.

He and his fellow plaintiffs who played JUCO ball aren’t the only ones challenging NCAA eligibility rules in court right now, though.

In men’s basketball, the NCAA granted eligibility to a former NBA Draft pick who only ever played in the summer league and overseas, as well as three guys who played in a defunct lower level of the NBA’s G League without signing a contract that could’ve had them playing in the real NBA. Plenty of people in college basketball complained about those, but the NCAA made those decisions without a court case necessary.

Right now, though, former Alabama player Charles Bediako got a ten-day restraining order against the NCAA on Wednesday that allows him to rejoin a college roster until a more full hearing and decision happens next week. It’s not clear he will play before then, and Alabama doesn’t list him on its online roster as of writing.

Bediako is different because he signed a two-way contract, which is a deal that allows a young player to split time between the NBA and G League. The NCAA considers that the kind of pro contract that results in permanent loss of eligibility, whereas the deals those other players had do not.

I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t guess where exactly things are going from here, but this strikes to the core of college sports. More than anything else, the eligibility rules define what college sports are. It’s why guys can’t play for a decade or enroll to get a few more years after a long pro career. All the changes with NIL and transfer rules have certainly shaken things up, but it’s still the same kinds of athletes playing in the same stage of their lives.

Amateurism was the original point of disqualifying people who’d played professionally, but now everyone who takes an NIL or revenue share dollar is a professional on some level. That justification is gone.

I do wonder if the NCAA can make a stand with the eligibility rules in a way it couldn’t with NIL, though. For one thing, the NCAA managed to avoid an injunction being granted in a lawsuit about the redshirt rule. A different Vanderbilt player than Pavia is arguing that it’s unfair that the redshirt rule allows some players to get NIL/rev share money for five years while those who don’t redshirt can only do it for four. That line of reasoning failed where Pavia’s arguments about JUCO’s effect on eligibility did not.

For another, there is a strong argument to be made that the eligibility rules have made college sports into the lucrative business that it is and that everything would fall apart without them. Americans don’t put big money and attention into minor league baseball, the G League, or the various spring football leagues (XFL, AAFL, etc.) like they do with college sports. That’s all tied into it being college sports largely played by traditionally college-aged players on a largely undergraduate degree-calibrated timeline. The only thing I know for sure is that billable hours will come out on top yet again.

So welcome to the newest new era of college athletics. Everything is up for grabs. Anything is possible, from a former doormat winning it all in a Cinderella-proof sport to a former draft pick playing collegiately. Buckle up. The ride is only getting faster from here.