Here’s a fun exercise: go 16-0. Beat literally everyone. Become the first team since Yale — Yale! In 1894! Back when a “national championship” was mostly decided by which Ivy League newspaper editor liked you best — to run an entire season without a blemish. Win the whole thing. Do it as a program that, three years ago, was somebody’s idea of a punchline.

Then open the next season ranked sixth.

That’s the spot Indiana finds itself in as the AP dropped its preseason Top 25 on Monday, and look, I get it — preseason rankings are vibes-based fan fiction dressed up as journalism. “Preseason poll” is an oxymoron on the level of “jumbo shrimp.” But even by the standards of a sport that treats predictive rigor as optional, this one stings a little. Ohio State’s No. 1. Fine, they’re loaded, we’ll get to that. Oregon’s No. 2. Georgia’s No. 3. Notre Dame’s No. 4. Texas — Texas, whose own head coach was on record this offseason calling undefeated seasons a thing of the past right before Indiana went out and had one — is No. 5.

Then, finally, at No. 6: the actual defending national champions. Sandwiched between four teams that didn’t win anything and Miami, the team Indiana just beat for the title.

(Miami’s at No. 7, by the way. Losing the championship game apparently ages better than winning most other games. There’s a lesson in there about ambition, or maybe there isn’t, and I’m just typing.)

Ohio State got 40 first-place votes. Indiana got eight. Which is another way of saying even the eight voters who put Indiana first probably checked their smoke detector twice before bed, just to be safe.

Here’s the actual take, stated as plainly as I know how: you don’t get to spend an entire season insisting nobody respects Indiana, watch them go 16-0 and win the thing outright, and then turn around next August and still not really respect them. That’s not skepticism. That’s a bit.

And the money backs it up in a way that should embarrass everybody involved. Which teams have the actual budget to justify ranking ahead of a defending champ? All five of them, as it turns out. Per roster valuation estimates from College Front Office, Texas tops the sport at $47.9 million, with Miami ($44.0M), Ohio State ($43.5M), Oregon ($42.8M) and Notre Dame ($40.4M) all packed in near the top. Texas A&M, Alabama, Texas Tech, Tennessee, Ole Miss, Georgia, USC, Oklahoma and Michigan round out the top 15. Indiana isn’t on that list. Every single team that finished 2025 with a championship parade outspent the team that actually threw the parade.

So is Curt Cignetti the best value-shopper in America, or did the sport’s money just look at an undefeated season and decide it was a fluke not worth paying for? Possibly both. It’s allowed to be both.

Spending that kind of money doesn’t guarantee anything, either — ask Clemson, a program that had been ranked in every single preseason AP poll since 2011, fourteen years running, and is now unranked entirely after stumbling to 7-6. Clemson still pulled 112 votes, more than any other unranked team, which tells you the voters wanted to rank them and just couldn’t do it in good conscience after watching that defense play like it was optional. USC and Michigan are the other side of the same coin — both sitting inside the top 15 in roster value, both technically ranked (14 and 16), and both still waiting for a season that actually looks like $30-plus million.

Then there’s the annual reminder that this sport still doesn’t know what to do with anybody outside the Power 4. Boise State and Navy are the highest-ranked Group of Six programs among the “others receiving votes,” pulling 43 and 10 votes respectively — about as close as either gets to actually cracking the poll, despite being the two most credible non-power-conference threats out there. Here’s the part that should really annoy you: James Madison and Tulane both made the actual 12-team Playoff last season without ever appearing in a single preseason poll. The system’s answer to “how do we treat schools that keep proving they belong” is apparently “make them prove it again, from outside the building, every year, forever.”

Last thing, and it’s the funniest part: if you’re hunting for reasons Indiana might not repeat, the schedule isn’t going to hand you one. Per ESPN’s FPI, Indiana’s 2026 slate ranks as the 33rd-toughest in the country — not exactly a murderer’s row. Compare that to Texas, who by SP+ has the single hardest schedule in the sport, an SEC gauntlet that runs through Ohio State, Oklahoma, Florida, Ole Miss, Mississippi State, LSU, Arkansas and Texas A&M. Or Oklahoma, LSU, Tennessee and Alabama, all sitting inside the top 15 nationally for schedule strength and all ranked ahead of Indiana right now — any of whom could be 9-3 by Thanksgiving wondering where the preseason hype went. Ohio State, for what it’s worth, has to go on the road to Bloomington this season as part of its own gauntlet, which means the Hoosiers get a direct chance to settle this themselves, on a Saturday, without needing anybody’s ballot.

So here’s where the bow goes: Indiana didn’t ask to be a value pick. They just won the whole thing, wire to wire, with a roster nobody in the top 15 valued as highly as their own, against a schedule that’s going to get tougher than 33rd before this is over. The Hoosiers open the year ranked sixth, disrespected by a poll that watched them do this exact thing last season starting at No. 20. If the pattern holds, that’s not a slight. That’s just the seeding for the sequel.