Just How Remarkable Was Indiana's 2025 Season?

Indiana’s Cinderella-like transformation from perpetual basement dweller into national champion was an astonishing story line in the 2025 college football season. As I was listening to The Shutdown Fullcast they posed a question that I found irresistibly interesting: how remarkable is Indiana’s turnaround? What historical precedent is there for a team to go from worst to first, and not just first but the first 16-0 team in the FBS division of college football? I gathered some data so that I could take a stab at figuring it out.

A note on bias: I’m not biased. Glad we could clear that up. I don’t root for or against Indiana on a regular basis. I did root for them in 2025 because I root for Florida and should be allowed some measure of happiness every once in a while. Next year though the Indiana story will stop being an underdog one and I will hope they get crushed as is the custom of being an equal opportunity hater.

Now, we here at Amateur Analysis like to keep the Amateur aspect alive, so I just want to say I’m no data scientist. I work with some. They talk to me sometimes, but mostly just to ask why I broke their data with my code. So take all of this with a grain of salt. I probably made some mistakes. However, I’m open to correction if I’m forcing the data to do tricks that it was never intended to do.

The first question we have to answer on the journey to deciding how remarkable Indiana’s 2025 campaign was, is to establish a baseline for “What counts as remarkable?”.

To do this I gathered all the game data I could find, going back as far as I could find. I used the VERY handy College Football Data API which has an insanely generous free tier (though after this I think I will support them via their Patreon to thank them for their hard work). Much easier than my prior methods of scraping ESPN data.

Then I started looking at the data. To normalize for different years with different season lengths I decided to compare winning percentages as opposed to win totals, and as well I decided to leave out shorter seasons, so I only counted seasons with 6 or more games. Here’s what the distribution of those look like for every team, every season, across all time in FBS:

So for the collection of season winning percentages we essentially have a normal distribution, meaning that most seasons on average will be somewhere around .500.

As we get towards the dual extremes of an undefeated season or a winless season, those outcomes get rarer and rarer. It’s about 3 times more common to go roughly .500 rather than having a fantastic season and about 5 times more common to go roughly .500 rather than having a horrendous season. This makes sense intuitively, because whenever you see the end results for a given conference for a given season you usually have one or two really good teams, one or two really bad teams, and a bunch of teams in between.

One way statistics help us see how average a season is with a number called standard deviation. A standard deviation of 0 means a season is exactly average.³ But as that number goes up or down, it means we’ve gotten well outside of an average season.

A standard deviation between -1 and +1 still means you’re pretty close to average. This is the home turf of teams such as Illinois, Virginia, and South Carolina. Seasons that are positively “meh”. The very definition of unremarkable.

Standard deviation of -2 means you have a very bad team. Not all-time bad, but definitely a season you’ll want to forget about. In this range we can find a plethora of memorably mediocre seasons like 2024 Florida State (-2.38) and 2025 Oklahoma State (-2.11).

Likewise a standard deviation of +2 means you had a quality season. In fact most years this will win you a national championship if you belong to a major conference. This is the realm of teams like 2019 LSU (+1.98) and 2024 Indiana (+2.13). Please note this is simply measure how REMARKABLE a season is. I’m not saying 2024 Indiana would beat 2019 LSU, only that given their various program’s history which one stands out more in contrast to the others.

As we get more extreme a standard deviation of -3 means you had not just a terrible season, but statistically one of the worst seasons of all time for that program. No one has ever had a full -3 season, but think along the lines of 2000 Alabama (-2.56) which most folks in Tuscaloosa would prefer to never ponder again.

Conversely +3 means an all time great season and almost assuredly would have gone undefeated.

However comparing one season like Indiana’s to all seasons of every team isn’t very helpful. Every team has their own average season. If a team like Alabama or Ohio State has a .500 season, heads would roll as those teams are about .750 all time. That’s not average for them, that’s a big disappointment. Similarly if UMass went 10-3 next year (as a team that is historically .275 all time) we’d call that an amazing season even if someone like Michigan would consider that “fine” to “decent”. Every team has their own standard.

So here’s how we’ll define a remarkable season. We’ll take a given season for a team, compare it to every other season that team has had, and measure the standard deviation. That way we’ll say how exceptional a given season is compared to a team’s total body of work.

Extremely. It’s worth noting that Indiana’s winning percentage chart looks markedly different than the one above.

As you can see on this chart, Indiana is the definition of “below” average. In fact their average season is .407. And see that glimmer of hope on the right? That mere sliver above 0.857? That is only two seasons: 2025 and 1945 (when they went 9-0-1).

So in terms of comparing Indiana in 2025 against Indiana historically, they were on a completely different level, with a standard deviation to prove it: +3.03. To put it into perspective, among all FBS seasons, compared to how historically bad they were, only two teams have ever had a standard deviation greater than +3. Here’s the top 10 of “remarkable” seasons by this definition:

Only one of these teams won a national championship: 2025 Indiana. And their strength of schedule in doing so is an impressive .614 meaning they played a relatively strong schedule (the 10th strongest schedule of any FBS team in 2025).

So going simply by winning percentage, Indiana’s season is definitely remarkable, but maybe that’s just a fluke of the statistics. What else could we look at to indicate they were so unmistakably different?

One other way that Indiana’s turnaround is evident is by looking at their scoring this season. Looking at their season they scored 666 points² and only allowed 187, giving a differential of +479 points. To make this comparable to other teams in other seasons of various lengths, let’s average this stat on a per game basis. So over 16 games, they averaged winning by 29.9 points per game. Pretty impressive considering they historically average LOSING a game by 2.48 points. So applying the same logic as above to get how many standard deviations they were above average, and limiting this to the modern era⁴ we see they are still a unique phenomenon.

So given what we can see here, that Indiana’s 2025 season was truly special, let’s cast our eyes forward. Who could, in the next few years, possibly become the next Indiana?

Let’s assume a team has a run like Indiana. 16 games. 16 wins. National Champions. Which teams would turn around their historic underachieving status into a Lazarus level resurrection of the program?

So of these prospective Cinderellas, none has won a national championship before, and a perfect season in the next few years would be a shocking turnaround. As of right now though the only one within sight of a possibility of a chance is Wake Forest. The Demon Deacons would truly be an amazing turnaround story, and with the ACC being the ACC you can’t say it would be impossible for them to do it.

In other words, you heard it here first: Wake Forest 2027 National Champions and people’s champion as they defeat Indiana to deny them their third straight national championship because we were getting sick of the Hoosiers talking smack about their dynasty.

Long live college football and its ability to surprise.