I think that belies the point and the real direction the wind of CFB is blowing which is that increasingly the best way to be successful is accumulating as much experience and as many 5th and 6th year players on your roster as possible whether that be through bringing in transfers from another program or bringing them with you as a coach (which is still using the portal!!). Your team has to be old as hell to win it all now it feels like Super disingenuous by Sherman to pretend Indiana or anyone else could have accomplished this without spending a fuckton of money in the transfer portal. Oh and to hand wave away getting the heisman trophy winner and their Rose Bowl MVP that way is laughable. If you look at the landscape right now every single top program has like 25+ outgoing transfers, and a smaller number of high end incoming transfers (with the exception of programs undergoing coaching changes who are doing full roster overhauls ie Cig's Indiana.) Kids who don't come in and play immediately are transferring out, period. They'll try to go somewhere else and develop then transfer again as seniors to try to win. High-end starters are being replaced with high-end transfers from lesser programs, not young guys coaches have recruited and developed in many cases. IU caught lightning in a bottle with Cig who was developing these players at a lesser program (some of whom ie Sarrat had transferred there from other schools) and the timing was right for him to make the jump up with them. Not a replicable program building strategy for other programs or IU moving forward imo
Yes the wind is blowing the way of portal team building and that’s a roll of the dice as to whether it works or not. It is also disingenuous to say that this Indiana team was built relying on the portal. Both are true. This is about as close to a hometown (coachgrown?) team as you can have in this era.
No one is hand waving Mendoza away. It is saying he’s the outlier on the roster and not the norm. And obviously it isn’t replicable for Indiana, Cignetti isn’t coming in from another program anymore lol.
Damn people really don’t want to just give Indiana credit lol. Mendoza was a top 5 portable QB last year but he was still a kid who was mid ranked out of HS and had thrown 30 tds and 16 INTs in his college career. Came to Indiana he threw 41/6 this year.
lots of praise over them winning but a lot of concern trolling over how good they'll be able to be next year and lying about the construction of this year's team
I think it’s pretty reasonable to question and debate if the worst program in the sport until two years ago can sustain this level of success.
I was wondering the same thing. If he is why wouldn't he stay with IU? Unless they have someone coming in via the portal.
he followed cigs from JMU so if he was good enough for him he's good enough for me. he also has to beat out the defacto current #1 6'7" graham knowles whose only career pass is an 84yd TD
I guess I just don’t understand what that Roger Sherman tweet is trying to say.. The last sentence seems to imply that it’s so great they built a national championship team without using the transfer portal? But 36% of their starters were transfers including their heisman QB and key members of their dominant offensive line, stated as if those players are not The main reason they’re so good, not including the other transfers that their coach brought? fees like a nonsense take trying to imply this team is somehow more pure than the rest of the elite teams. Cig can be an elite elite coach AND his team can only exist because of the transfer portal both can be true and fine
of the 22 starters, 10 were "transfers" in that they didn't play at indiana in 2023 or 2024, sure. but of those 10, five of them were from JMU, the place where cigs last coached. and one other was previously at indiana under tom allen, left for a year, and then came back. so, in reality, we are talking about four guys. mendoza, hemby and coogan were huge for them. no one is diminishing that. but it's not like he was building the team wholesale from the portal like FSU has often done under Norvell or like OSU's championship team or even really like TTU where it wasn't the majority of the team but the majority of starters on one side of the ball. it is disingenuous to present this as "oh just another team built in the portal" when the majority of those "transfers" were just guys following their coach to his next job.