If Indiana Can Do It, Why Not Michigan State?

Kevin Garnett once shouted, “Anything is possible!” after winning an NBA Championship. In college football, that statement felt untrue for most of my life. But now, it has a revised meaning in the land of college football.

Now that the Indiana Hoosiers are officially the NCAA Football Champions of the world, the thought that any team could go from first to worst—or worst to first—in a matter of two years is no longer just a fantasy. It’s now a fact, and a real possibility for any program.

The Hoosiers have never been thought of as a college football powerhouse. In fact, if you didn’t play in the Big Ten, you probably forgot they were even a Division I football team. Indiana’s bread and butter has always been basketball. There’s an iconic movie made about their hoops program called Hoosiers. Football, meanwhile, was mostly absent—often barely filling the stadium. They had just two winning seasons in the last 28 years, with their best record during that stretch being 8–5.

Then the NCAA began moving into a new era—one aimed at bringing parity to a league controlled by five or six programs for more than a century. If you weren’t a fan of one of those teams, once your school took its first loss, there was little reason to keep watching.

Parity is exactly what the NCAA was searching for, and they found it.

Indiana winning the championship this year after flipping the program last season—going 11–2, then following it up with a perfect 16–0 run—bleeds hope into every program across the nation, especially those in the Power Five. What this era has shown is that success no longer requires decades of dominance. It requires timing, resources, and the right approach.

What it looks like now is that you need a major booster willing to invest heavily, then load your roster with experienced players rather than banking solely on freshmen who may stick around for a year or two. With the transfer portal functioning the way it does—and with no real multi-year contracts—every offseason brings better and better players into the portal. Not just higher-rated recruits, but experienced players who know what it takes to win, rather than guys chasing a one-year splash for individual goals.

At first glance, the Spartans might seem completely outmatched in the Big Ten. The future can feel bright, but distant. However, in today’s landscape, that light at the end of the tunnel may be far closer than it appears in the mirror.

Michigan State began this reset by moving on from its dull, run-of-the-mill head coach and hiring an exciting new leader in Pat Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald has proven he can lead men and resurrect a forgotten program. During his 17 years at Northwestern, he consistently took a down-and-out team and made it competitive. Much like Curt Cignetti at Indiana, Fitzgerald understands how to build something from the ground up. He never reached the heights Indiana just did—but in my opinion, that’s because it was a different time.

Now, with a 12-team playoff, Miami (FL) showed you only need to get hot at the right time, and Indiana showed you that having the right roster and leadership can make anything possible.

The Spartans also received a massive booster payment totaling $401 million. That financial backing gave Michigan State serious flexibility to replenish a roster that lost more than 40 players to the portal. The money was spent wisely: fortifying the trenches on both sides of the ball, stacking running backs to support a pounding rushing attack, adding linebackers who can get after the quarterback, and bringing in an experienced secondary with a knack for ball-hawking.

If Michigan State can put all of these pieces together, there’s no reason to believe that what Indiana just accomplished—however implausible and improbable it may seem—is entirely out of reach.

Sure, you can try to mimic a winning culture all you want, but without the right personnel, it won’t take you very far. Just ask Matt Patricia and the Detroit Lions after they tried to become the Detroit Patriots.

I’m not saying Michigan State can simply copy Indiana’s blueprint and go undefeated en route to a national championship. But what I am saying is that a program long buried—counted out time and time again—just rose from the ashes to win college football’s most cherished trophy. That alone proves there is real hope for teams that feel six feet under.

This is the version of college football I want to live in. Yes, there’s frustration about players being paid years after enrolling, about loyalty disappearing, about teenagers earning massive sums of money. But if you can embrace the new wave of college football, you’ll see more champions like Indiana in the coming decades.

And maybe—just maybe—one of them will come from East Lansing.