Indiana Football’s Title Odds for 2026 Suggest No One Has Learned Anything Yet

As you’ve surely heard, Indiana football is your new reigning national champion. Bloomington is the happiest place on earth, and every columnist in America is racing to explain how the sport may never be the same again. (For the record, I agree.)

Here on The Roar, I pay particular attention to odds and betting angles, so it was only a few minutes after Curt Cignetti & Co. lifted the trophy that I took a peek at the college football national championship odds for 2026, which BetMGM’s trading team had already dutifully priced at posted. 

Was Indiana the favorite to win it all next year? 

No.

Were they at least the favorite among Big Ten teams?

No.

Were they the second Big Ten team, maybe?

No.

Three days after winning the national championship, Indiana (+800) is fifth in BetMGM’s college football futures table, trailing behind Ohio State, Notre Dame, Oregon, and Texas. Georgia (+900) is nearby, and then there’s a sizable jump up to where a collection of prominent SEC brands (Alabama et al) are all priced at 15-to-1.

It’s the early market saying: OK, sure. We guess we’ll put the Hoosiers at the bottom of next year’s A-Tier. 

Yikes.

This is, in my humblest of opinions, a big miss by the opening market. And, curiously, it can almost certainly be tied directly to a specific market inefficiency.

Indiana is being priced like the Hoosiers are mostly a cute story that doesn’t need to be respected beyond the 2025 season. 

As anyone who’s paid close attention to this Indiana run can attest, this wasn’t a conventional Cinderella run where everything magically went right for an A team with a C brand. Indiana won its way to a national championship the hard way, beating Ohio State, Alabama, Oregon, and Miami, all in about five weeks. None of the results were lucky mistakes, either. 

Their reward for next year? Being priced behind two of those four teams.

And look, you don’t automatically get to be the favorite for next season because you won it all this year. That’s not how it works. But in the case of the Hoosiers, they have the best head coach in the sport right now, and he’s clearly just a lot better than everyone else at identifying talent, working the transfer portal, and developing a roster.

That’s how a team built around JMU’s 2023 core and a Cal transfer quarterback won the national title in 2025.

There is a good argument for some of these teams. With Indiana turning over so much of its roster, maybe an early college football futures bettor would prefer to take a shot with someone like Notre Dame, which retains its coach/quarterback dynamic with Marcus Freeman and CJ Carr. 

But overall, the traffic in front of Indiana reveals the market doesn’t quite understand what’s taken place. 

This isn’t quite Tuscaloosa in 2010 – Cignetti is already one of the oldest coaches in college football – but Indiana is going to continue to be relevant at the top of the sport for the next few years. Until Cignetti retires, the Big Ten is more likely to run through Bloomington than it is Columbus, Ann Arbor, or anywhere else.

Those other schools will continue to get a lot of highly-rated recruits. But Cignetti just beat them all with two-star kids and a limited budget. With more resources on the horizon, he’s most likely going to reload and do it again. 

Indiana @ +800