It is only appropriate that in this – surely the strangest college football season ever – Indiana, the team that entered the 2025 season with the most defeats of any team in college history, finishes the season with a perfect 12-0 record and the No. 1 seeding in the college football playoffs. This is like the Washington Generals beating the Harlem Globetrotters, the Jamaicans winning the Olympic bobsled gold medal or Luxembourg winning World War III.

How crazy was this season? Let us count the ways:

• Notre Dame wins 10 straight games after losing its first two (to ranked teams by a total of four points). Yet, the Irish are snubbed and don’t make the playoffs. But that’s not all. Notre Dame, the school of Touchdown Jesus, Knute Rockne and George Gipp, takes its ball and goes home, refusing to play in a bowl game. As Tyler Cleveland said on our Crooked Letter podcast:  It’s almost as if the ghosts of Gipp and Rockne told the non-fighting Irish, “One day when the going gets tough, tell the boys to skip one for the Gipper.”
• Ole Miss wins 11 games for the first time in a regular season, makes the playoffs, but will play  in the post-season without the head coach who led them there. I mean, how crazy is that? To which Lane Kiffin, the Snidely Whiplash of college football, adjusts his visor, gazes off into the distance, and smirks.
• After losing seven of their final eight games Mississippi State’s Bulldogs will play in the Dukes Mayo Bowl against Wake Forest Jan. 2. What’s more, included in the State entourage to Charlotte will be newly hired defensive coordinator Zach Arnett, the former Bulldog head coach, whom State was still paying (for one more year) his nearly $5 million buyout from when he was fired as State’s head coach. I mean, how does that even work?
• Amory native Will Hall, fired at Southern Miss in October 2024, is named the new head coach at Tulane 14 months later. Ironically, Hall’s biggest win during his 14-30 tenure at USM, was over Cotton Bowl-bound Tulane, at Tulane, on Sept. 24, 2022. Amazingly, USM won that game with a true freshman quarterback Zach Wilcke, who has since played at Northwest Community College and at Charlotte and is back in the transfer portal with one year of eligibility remaining. In retrospect, should Tulane beat Ole Miss on Dec. 20 it would be no bigger upset than Southern Miss beating Tulane back in 2022.
• Leave it to Ed Orgeron to tell us the main way in which college football has changed in recent years. Speaking on the popular “Bussin’ with the Boys” podcast, Orgeron said this: ”Back then, we used to walk through the back door with the cash. Now we just gotta walk through the front door with the cash!” In this case, Coach O speaks the truth. Money rules the sport.
• Here’s another way college football has changed: It used to be that playing in a bowl game was the pot at the end of the rainbow, a cherished reward for all the hard work. That’s not always the case these days. Notre Dame turning down a bowl game is one thing, but Kansas State and Iowa State of the Big 12 Conference are also skipping the post-season. Too good for a bowl? Iowa State? Kansas State? Come on…
• Two of the top candidates for the Heisman Trophy, which goes to the most outstanding player in college football, are Vanderbilt’s Diego Pavia and Indiana’s Fernando Mendoza, two practically un-recruited quarterbacks. Pavia is a sixth-year player who was un-rated as a junior college recruit. Mendoza is a former walk-on. Oh, yes, and one player who should be in New York for the Heisman presentation but won’t be is Ole Miss Rebel Trinidad Chambliss, who did not receive a Division I scholarship offer out of high school. So much for recruiting stars. You could put all three of those guys’ recruiting stars together and still not have more than you and me.
• You may remember that much ado was made when analyst and former coach Lee Corso was a perfect 6-0 in his final picks on “College Game Day.” Almost forgotten is the fact that Corso picked LSU and Penn State to play for the national championship. Both fired their coaches in October. Oops!
• Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry throws a hissy fit about LSU, the state’s flagship university, having to pay football coach Brian Kelly a $54 million buyout after firing him. Landry says such long-term, high dollar contracts are idiotic, something a lot of us would not argue. But then, Landry actively recruits Kiffin, whom LSU will pay $91 million over the next seven years if he stays that long. Kiffin’s buyout is substantially higher than Kelly’s.
• And you couldn’t make this up. Part of Kiffin’s new deal is that LSU would have to pay him $1 million if Ole Miss goes on to win the national championship. And so it goes. As they say, you could not make this stuff up…