There's a scene in the movie Air that I love. If you're not familiar, the film is about Nike's long-shot pursuit of Michael Jordan's shoe endorsement, with Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro and Ben Affleck hilariously as Phil Knight. Early on in the film, Jason Bateman's character is leading a meeting of Nike's marketing team as they brainstorm which three players the company would spend its meager $250,000 budget on. After some prodding, one character, Bill, suggests Melvin Turpin. What does Bill like about Turpin, a 6-foot-11 center who averaged one assist a game for the 1983-84 Kentucky Wildcats? "He's got great court vision," Bill says. After Damon's Vaccaro presses Bill for some more information about Turpin and it becomes clear Bill has none, Vaccaro says, "You like Turpin because he's the sixth pick in the draft and no one's going to give you shit for saying you like the sixth pick in the draft."
Anyway, when I think of the 2026 Indiana Hoosiers football team, I can't stop thinking about the late, great Melvin Turpin.
Let's start with what we know because, unlike Bill, we've actually watched these guys play.
Indiana has the best coaching staff in college football. Curt Cignetti is 146-37 as a head coach, and 27-2 at Indiana. In 15 seasons as a head coach, he's won nine or more games more often (nine times) than not (six), and that includes the pandemic-shorted spring 2021 season and a 2022 season in which James Madison went 8-3 and could not play in the Sun Belt Championship or a bowl game because they were transitioning to FBS. Coordinators Mike Shanahan and Bryant Haines have been with Cignetti since Elon, and special teams coordinator Grant Cain is in Year 8 under Cignetti. That alone gives Indiana a significant leg up on the competition.
Cignetti and his coaches have clearly mastered the transfer portal, both in terms of identifying talent and then assimilating that talent into their system. And on the whole, the guys Indiana brought in are more talented than the guys they lost. IU ranked 13th in the On3 transfer portal rankings in 2025; in 2026, they ranked first.
Then again, it takes an inordinate amount of faith to assume Indiana can lose what they lost and pick up where they left off. Cignetti made news when he said he ripped stud wide receiver transfer Nick Marsh for wearing the wrong cleats to his first Indiana practice. "I didn't love those gold shoes he came out in today. He learned what getting your ass ripped is all about. I don't know if that happened to him very often at Michigan State. That was before practice started."
Indiana's run began with a head start because of the 13 players he brought over from James Madison; defensive tackle Tyrique Tucker is the only one left. Cignetti was optimistic about what he saw this spring, but also acknowledged back in March he and his staff have "more work to do with this group than the first two teams."
The schedule is also much more difficult than it's been the last two seasons. Ohio State comes to Bloomington on Oct. 17, and the Hoosiers go to the Big House the following week. November brings USC to Indiana, and then a trip to Washington the next week.
Please don't take any of this as an argument against Indiana. None of us would be surprised if Indiana was 10-2, 11-1 or even 12-0 and back in the CFP. Then again, 8-4 is on the table, too. It's college football -- winning is hard, and no one's immune from bad breaks.
I'm in the early stages of putting together the FootballScoop Pre-Preseason Top 25 for 2026, and so far all four pollsters I've surveyed have Indiana at, you guessed it, sixth. Not fifth, not seventh, but sixth across the board. Keep in mind: Indiana is the only team to carry the same ranking across all four polls. They have four different No. 1s, four different No. 2s, three No. 3s, four No. 4s, and three No. 5s, but they're all in lockstep: Indiana is No. 6.
Preseason rankings are as much about risk minimization for the pollsters as they are a projection about the upcoming season, and thus far I've yet to see anyone brave enough to slot the defending champions first or second, nor are they bold enough to foresee a falloff and rank IU in the teens or twenties. To quote Sonny Vaccaro, no one's going to give you s--- for ranking the defending national champions sixth in your preseason poll.
And yet, there may be wisdom in the pollsters' collective shrug. In college football's Championship Era (since 1998), only five defending champions have started the following season sixth or lower in the preseason AP Top 25: 2007 Florida, 2008 LSU, 2011 Auburn, 2020 LSU, and 2024 Michigan. Only 2007 Florida finished in the top-25, and those Gators (who went 9-4 and finished 13th) had the Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback and would go on to win the national title the following year.
Unfortunately for Bill back at the conference table in Nike headquarters, Turpin would not have been a worthy investment of Nike's endorsement money, playing only five NBA seasons. (Don't look up what happened after that.)
For Curt Cignetti and the defending national champions, here's hoping that's where the Melvin Turpin similarities end.