Miami vs. Indiana should be a thrilling conclusion to the college football season. Here are seven things that will (or won’t) happen in the CFP national championship.
This is going to be fun.
When No. 1 Indiana plays No. 10 Miami for the national championship on Monday night, Miami’s stadium might be overrun with Indiana fans who will apparently spend any amount of money to follow their school’s first national title contender to the ends of the earth.
Curt Cignetti has a chance to cap the greatest two-year turnaround in the sport’s history by winning it all. Mario Cristobal, a son of both Miami and the Miami football program, has a chance to lead his alma mater back to the mountaintop in a game that just so happens to be in his own city.
The football gods have laid the narrative on thick, and this meeting will be a blast to witness.
Here are seven specific predictions.
FBSIndiana vs. Miami Predictions: Seven Things That Will Happen in the CFP National Championship Game
2 minutes ago Alex Kirshner1. Miami will get to Fernando Mendoza often.
Miami’s best position group is edge rusher, where it has two future NFL stars in Rueben Bain Jr. and Akheem Mesidor. Both are rocking pressure rates north of 20%, and their combined adjusted sack total is a ridiculous 34. (Adjusted sacks are credited when a player generates a pressure and the play ends in a sack.)
Not surprisingly, Miami has a 43.7% team pressure rate that ranks fourth in the FBS.
Meanwhile, Indiana’s pass protection is good but far from elite, with a 27.9% pressure rate allowed that ranks 15th among Power Four teams.
The pressure point here is clear: Right tackle Kahlil Benson, whose 11.5% pressure rate allowed is comfortably the worst on an otherwise sound line. Miami’s game plan will be to deny Benson help whenever possible and make him block Bain or Mesidor alone.
2. Pressure will not be enough to flip the game … at least not on its own.
For one thing, Fernando Mendoza’s numbers when pressured are fine.
Heating Mendoza up makes him into more or less a statistically average quarterback. But even on the days when Mendoza and his linemen have had sack problems, Indiana has been uncommonly good at getting over it.
FBS teams that allowed three sacks in a game this season were 161-376, for a winning percentage of an even .300. Even ranked teams that let up three sacks were just 37-41.
But the Hoosiers were 4-0 in these cases, including close wins over Ohio State and Penn State and a blowout of Alabama. That doesn’t mean it’s cool to take sacks, and Mendoza has gotten pretty lucky. He’s fumbled five times this season (including twice in a semifinal win over Oregon, once on a sack), but Indiana has gotten every one of those loose balls back.
The lesson: Sack Mendoza a few times, make sure you get the ball out, and then politely ask it to bounce your way. Maybe, just maybe, you can make Indiana pay for the occasional pass protection issue.
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2 days ago Donald Kolakowski3. Indiana’s secondary will lose a cat-and-mouse game, at least once.
My favorite individual matchup of the title game is the one between 24-year-old Indiana safety Louis Moore and 18-year-old Miami receiver Malachi Toney.
Moore started playing college football at the JUCO level in 2020, when Toney turned 13. Now it will be Moore’s job (along with the rest of the Indiana secondary but bear with my narrative) to avoid getting burned by Miami’s tendency to throw screens and short balls to Toney and let him run with them.
When defenses pay too much attention to Miami’s quick game, they sometimes forget that Miami has other good receivers, like Keelan Marion, who slipped behind the entire Ole Miss secondary in the semifinals for the easiest 52-yard score of his life.
I think Miami will burn Indiana for a long touchdown pass at some point, or at least a 40- or 50-yard field flipper. The Hoosiers are aggressive about rallying to the ball, and that serves them well. But if Miami plays its hand right, the Hurricanes can turn that tendency into a huge play or two.
4. Indiana will not get a sack on defense.
Miami allows the lowest pressure rate in the Power Four at 20.8%. The Canes keep Carson Beck clean because they have good linemen (left tackle Francis Mauigoa will soon be a first-round pick) and because Beck gets the ball out of his hands in an average of 2.36 seconds, faster than any other Power Four starting QB this year.
Meanwhile, Indiana had a menacing pass rush this season, but the team’s leading pressure man, Mikail Kamara, does not appear to be fully healthy right now.
He’s not the same guy who has a 27.8% pressure rate to lead the Hoosiers. Indiana’s next most prolific edge rusher, Stephen Daley, is out for the season. I do not expect Beck to be all that rushed to throw, unless Indiana blitzes a ton.
5. Carson Beck will throw at least one interception.
When Beck throws fewer than two picks, Miami is perfect. When he throws two against a power conference opponent, Miami is 0-2.
I don’t see Beck playing INT-free against the defense that had the eighth-highest defensive interception rate (4%) in the country and confuses QBs so thoroughly that it has picked them off on the first drive three times.
Aren’t things supposed to be scripted out for simplicity that early in the game?
I think the Hoosiers will get Beck at least once, and if they get him twice, that’s the signal that Miami has no real chance to pull the upset.
6. Indiana will win and cover an 8.5-point spread.
Don’t just take it from me, but from the Opta supercomputer, which gives Indiana an 85.7% chance of winning. The Hoosiers are the better team.
7. When Indiana wins, I’ll start talking about the Hoosiers as one of the best teams in college football history.
This is rat poison, the sort of thing Hoosiers fans should not read before the game.
But if Indiana wins, it will be just the second 16-0 team in major college football history, joining a prehistoric Yale team from 1894. If given a time machine that could pit teams from across eras against each other, I would not pick this Indiana team to beat 2019 LSU (which went 15-0) or whichever early-2000s Miami team gets you most excited.
TRACR (Team Rating Adjusted for Competition and Roster), however, indicates that Indiana isn’t that far away from the top-ranked teams since 2012. The model uses advanced metrics and other factors to calculate how many points per 10 drives better or worse teams are or were compared to the league-average squad during a given season.
Heading into the title game, Indiana has a TRACR of 40.9 that, for now, sits ninth among the highest marks since 2012. 2020 Alabama (51.9), 2021 Georgia (48.3), 2018 Alabama (47.7) and that 2019 LSU team (47.3) are the top four in those rankings.
For an all-time team, Indiana does not have the same game-wrecking talent that those teams had. But that’s part of Indiana’s potential “best team ever” case, oddly enough.
In an era of the transfer portal and NIL, it’s not possible for one program to stockpile the world-beating talent that those teams had. The Power Four leagues are closely packed together, with undefeated seasons theoretically harder to come by than ever.
Avoiding a single misstep in 16 games would give IU a nice argument.
Alex Kirshner co-hosts the popular college football podcast Split Zone Duo. For more coverage, follow along on social media on Instagram, Bluesky, Facebook and X.
Indiana vs. Miami Predictions: Seven Things That Will Happen in the CFP National Championship Game Opta Analyst.
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