At the time the Big Ten Conference announced the schedule for its 2025 football competition, all the way back before last Christmas, there was no kickoff time attached to the meeting between Illinois and Indiana on the third Saturday of September.
And already it quite obviously was a prime-time game.
“I knew at the end of last year,” Illinois coach Bret Bielema told The Sporting News. “I knew that this game potentially could be a big one from the time last season ended to when we started getting ready for this year. We started getting ready for them in February.”
Yes, we’re three paragraphs into this, four if you count the one you’re reading now, and we are seriously discussing Illinois vs. Indiana as a consequential college football game, one that warrants the prime exposure will get as part of NBC’s “Here Comes Saturday Night” package of 7:30 p.m. Big Ten Conference games.
“I think the point of an expanded College Football Playoff was to create paths for teams like Indiana and Illinois,” NBC Sports lead insider Nicole Auerbach told TSN.
“I don’t think those would have necessarily been the first two schools you would have thought of as the biggest beneficiaries … but I think there’s a real benefit to expanding the postseason for depth in all of these conferences and creating real pathways, and also for all of us to be engaged with them throughout the season.”
Until the past five years, a massive clash between the Illini and Hoosiers required the participation of someone like Stephen Bardo and Jay Edwards. Their men’s basketball programs own a combined 13 NCAA Final Fours between them, and such legends as Isiah Thomas, Kendall Gill, Calbert Cheaney, Dee Brown, George McGinnis and Red Kerr hooped at one of the two schools.
But now these two can play a September football game and demand the attention of those who care deeply about the sport. The majesty of college football in 2025 is the most prominent games no longer are the exclusive province of a few blueblood programs. There will be other nationally televised games in the time slot, in fact college football fills every network Saturday night: Florida-Miami on ABC, Arizona State-Baylor on Fox, the Apple Cup between Washington and Washington State on CBS. No. 9 Illinois vs. No. 19 Indiana is the only one that matches two AP-ranked, undefeated teams.
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The expansion of the College Football Playoff assures there is a potential future for the winner of this game, and possibly the loser, beyond the ReliaQuest Bowl. The changes to recruiting that resulted from revenue sharing, name/image/likeness payments and immediate transfer eligibility empowered programs beyond the traditional brands to field more potent and competitive teams.
“Roster retention and roster acquisition – I think it’s just at a different level,” Bielema, Illini coach since 2021, told TSN. “When I was at Wisconsin, we had won three straight Big Titles … and at that point, as good as we were, and I think we were good recruiters, you couldn’t get certain kids to even talk to you. In-state, we did good, and in the Midwest, but we couldn’t go down to Florida, couldn’t go to other areas that didn’t touch our state and feel like we could compete with maybe the traditional bluebloods of college football that’s always been. I remember Coach (Barry) Alvarez telling me: ‘It’s hard to erase 50 years of history.’
“With that being said, in the world we’re in now, the way you can acquire student-athletes – it’s not just all financial-driven, either. Probably half of my roster could probably have gone somewhere else for more money. But what they do know is what you can do for them here, and what you can do for their future. And I think that’s the really, really big part of acquisition. I think that beginning phase of NIL three years ago, there was a huge movement of: Who’s going to pay me the most money? But now, with stories that have become reality, history that can be written about, kids know that where you go and where you’re taken care of is one thing, but how you get prepared for the future is an even bigger thing.”
In a way, Illinois actually was inspired by what it saw last season from Indiana, as first-year Hoosiers coach Curt Cignetti took great advantage of the transfer of a number of winning players from his outstanding team at James Madison, a gifted veteran transfer quarterback (Kurtis Rourke), some hungry veterans eager for success and a slightly advantageous schedule to become one of the first at-large selections to the initial 12-team College Football Playoff.
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Rourke had only one year to spend at Indiana, but Cignetti and his staff again were able to land one of the top transfer QBs, Fernando Mendoza of the Cal Bears, who has 9 TD passes and a 72.4 completion rate, albeit against Indiana State, Kennesaw State and Old Dominion. All three of the team’s 200-yard rushers are transfers, but top wideout Omar Cooper has been a career Hoosier.
“I was talking to Kellan Wyatt, one of the defensive linemen at Indiana, he transferred from Maryland. One of the things that really intrigued him was the season that Indiana put together last year,” Anthony Herron of SiriusXM and the Big Ten Network told TSN. “He’s a guy from the DMV. He loves Maryland, still bleeds their colors and everything, but now for him, playing for Indiana, he knows: There’s proof of concept there where Indiana was going to be a team in the playoff conversation. And it was a part of why he decided, as much as he enjoyed his Maryland career, he wanted to be with a team that had proven they could win at that championship level. It’s going to be his last shot at making the playoff, and I get that.”
Illini quarterback Luke Altmyer, off to a sizzling start with 71.8 percent completions and 8 touchdowns in a 3-0 start, is from Starkville, Miss., and spent two years with the Ole Miss Rebels before transferring to Illinois and winning the starting QB job in 2023. He led the Illini to a 10-3 record and Citrus Bowl victory over South Carolina last season.
But leading rusher Kaden Feagin and top receiver Hank Beatty, with 19 catches for 289 yards, were recruited out of high school.
“When Bret Bielema first took over the Illini, the transfer portal didn’t exist, so his approach to building the Illini was a little more methodical, a little more what the traditional sort of rebuild is, where you need a few years” Herron said. “You’ve got to win enough for them to let you stick around, but a few years into it, he’s been able to put his core of players in place, to know exactly how he operates. It’s a deeper program because of the portal, but it’s Bielema’s culture.
“With Cignetti at Indiana, the transfer portal helped him bring a bunch of players from James Madison who knew exactly what his standards were, how he operates. So his culture was already intact. They just brought it with them to Bloomington. So they were able to just fly out of the gate in his first season. He was able to do it more quickly, because he took this job when the portal was already a factor.”
During the 10 seasons of the four-team College Football Playoff, 58 percent of the available berths were awarded to just four teams: Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Oklahoma. That’s 3 percent of the teams consuming more than half the playoff bids.
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Given the absence of automatic qualification, it was accurate (and appropriate) for Auerbach and others to join the analysts who referred to the CFP as “an invitational” rather than a legitimate championship tournament. There is no such concern now, with the 12-team field in place. Illinois and Indiana can contend to earn the automatic berth presented to the Big Ten champion or can compile an attractive enough record to earn consideration as an at-large selection, as the Hoosiers were a year ago.
“I was really high on Illinois all offseason because of all the returning players and the schedule, the way that it falls,” Auerbach said. “But it was really hyper-fixated on this game. To me, if Illinois clears this hurdle after clearing the hurdle with Duke, you are talking playoffs. And, all of a sudden, you’re talking about Illinois as a playoff team for the next two months. And what that means for their program, recruiting, their fans – that’s all part of the benefit of expanding the playoff.”
Indiana fans – the fans, not the players, please – can take pride in the fact their squad has earned enough cachet to be installed as a 6-point favorite against an opponent carrying a top-10 poll ranking. Illinois can arrive undaunted, though, aware they’re the only one of the two that’s defeated a Power-4 conference opponent.
"Illinois, they've become a more explosive offense, but where they've impressed me and Luke Altmyer has impressed me is in the red zone," Herron said. "Their offensive coordinator, Barry Lunney Jr., he does a really effective job of moving Luke Altmyer, really an underappreciated athlete at quarterback. When they get in the red zone, that's when they do a good job with bootlegs, sprint-type action to get the pocket moving, and sometimes he'll become a runner and get you rushing touchdowns. He's really precise and protects the football really well when he's down there.
"I think Fernando Mendoza has gotten better and better each week. They're running an almost identical offense to what they ran last year, but Mendoza is a much better athlete. That enhances what they can do. Cignetti has told me a few different times he prefers a dual-threat quarterback, and he's got that now."
Illinois vs. Indiana is the new normal in college football. Ohio State-Michigan, Alabama-Auburn and Texas-Oklahoma will not lose any of their accumulated stature on the college football landscape. But no longer do they stand alone, unchallenged.