'Refused to lose': Indiana shows championship potential with improbable win at Penn State

Curt Cignetti has been a football coach since 1983, he’s been a head football coach for 14 years, and he’s been around the game his entire life.

Yet on Saturday at Beaver Stadium, he made an assertion: “It was the most improbable victory I’ve ever been a part of.”

Indiana’s 27-24 win over Penn State wasn’t just an entertaining comeback victory — it was a season-defining moment. It showed exactly what the Hoosiers were made of, and they delivered in the best way possible.

Down 24-21 with 1:51 left on the clock, Indiana had a chance to win a ballgame that it didn’t play particularly sound in. There were mistakes throughout the contest, particularly in the second half, and IU let Penn State take the lead after previously being up 20-7 midway through the third quarter.

There was still hope, but after the first play of the series, most of that hope was wiped away. Quarterback Fernando Mendoza was sacked for a loss of 7 yards, and Indiana didn’t have any timeouts. The clock was ticking — not only on IU’s chances of beating Penn State, but on its perfect regular season.

But with their backs against the wall, the Hoosiers never quit.

“Refuse to lose,” Cignetti said, summing up the fight in his team.

Coach Q&A: Curt Cignetti reacts to Indiana’s win over Penn State

On the play immediately after he was sacked, Mendoza fired a 22-yard bullet to wide receiver Omar Cooper Jr., and so it began. The Hoosiers marched down the field as the clock neared zero, and went on a 9-play, 80-yard drive to secure the victory.

Mendoza found Cooper Jr. once more for the go-ahead touchdown with just 36 seconds remaining, with Cooper Jr. making arguably the greatest catch in Indiana football history with his toe-tap in the back of the end zone.

It was a phenomenal play between two fantastic players, but a win like this speaks volumes about Indiana as an entire team — and a prime reason why the Hoosiers are 10-0 for the second straight season under Cignetti.

It’s a program that has unwavering confidence in itself, and it paid off on Saturday. The Hoosiers refused to concede, and that’s just the way they’re wired.

“The best thing I can say is we refused to lose. We had that one last big run left in us when probably most people had counted us out,” Cignetti told reporters postgame.

“I guarantee you when Fernando got sacked on first down, how many people in this room counted us out, right?”

No matter how many people counted Indiana out, the only people that mattered didn’t. The Hoosiers believed, even when the odds were stacked against them, and pulled off a miraculous final drive that showed Indiana’s true colors.

“The only thing I said to a lot of the guys, we’re gonna find out what we’re made of,” Cignetti mentioned.

And well, Indiana’s head coach found out exactly how his team battles adversity. All year long, the Hoosiers have responded, and it’s not hard to understand why — it’s all about the mentality that Indiana carries each and every day.

“Whenever we get punched in the mouth, we’ve been there before, and we know and we have belief in each other,” Mendoza said following the win.

Indiana hadn’t faced anything like what it was up against vs. Penn State, though. They’ve made big plays throughout the season, but down by four with less than two minutes left? Getting sacked on the first play of the drive with the clock running? That’s storybook.

But for Indiana, it was what it expected to do. It doesn’t believe it’s a team of destiny, it understands that with the work they put in, the results — even the unlikely ones — will follow.

It was a total team effort, as without Indiana’s defense forcing a Penn State punt right before the two-minute warning, the offense wouldn’t have even been given a chance to execute a game-winning drive.

How it Happened: No. 2 Indiana defeats Penn State 27-24 after miraculous final drive

“In the fourth quarter when we needed it the most, the characteristics of this team really came out,” linebacker Aiden Fisher said postgame.

“So it was a group that we knew was going to come down to us to get the stop to win.”

The Hoosiers delivered on defense when they needed to. They responded after giving up touchdowns on the previous two Penn State drives, as they never quit when things looked bleak.

“But when you just talk about resiliency, always coming up in the clutch, and just refusing to lose. When it comes down, you know, game on the line, you know it’s time to make money, this team refuses to lose. I think that’s the best quality you can have as a team,” Fisher added.

Championship teams find ways to win, even in the most improbable of circumstances — and that’s exactly what Indiana did. As a team with Big Ten and national championship aspirations, it showed that it can handle itself when almost anyone else in the country wouldn’t.

The Hoosiers weren’t perfect on Saturday in Happy Valley. In fact, you could argue that they weren’t even good. But what you can’t argue is that Indiana refused to quit — it never wavered, and it found a way to win when it probably shouldn’t have.

Indiana was destined to lose. Its perfect record was slipping away, and the questions about whether the Hoosiers are for real would’ve begun to come back.

But when the game went final, it was Indiana 27, Penn State 24.

Why?

Well, as Cignetti put it: “Refused to lose in the bleakest, most dire moments when it looked impossible.”

Indiana has the makings of a championship team, and it proved that with its improbable comeback over Penn State.

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