The Indiana-Miami CFP Game Is the Hollywood Tangle We Didnt Know We Needed

The screenwriter Angelo Pizzo was in an Uber from the Hard Rock Hotel to South Beach Sunday afternoon, on his way to a bar that would be swimming in Indiana University red. “It feels like we’re taking over all of Miami,” he mused as his car shot down Florida’s Turnpike past Hard Rock Stadium.

Pizzo, who wrote Rudy and Hoosiers, is the bard of Indiana sports movies — perhaps the bard of all sports movies. He sees in the college-football title game between long-neglected Indiana and once-great Miami a quintessential Hollywood tale. “We’re the ultimate underdog story,” said Pizzo, who lives in Bloomington. “The school nobody gave a chance to from the ‘flyover’ state against a powerhouse.”

On Monday night here, at the home of whatever is left of the Miami Dolphins, the Hoosiers will take on the Hurricanes in a game broadcast on ESPN and its slew of simulcasts. Never mind that Indiana is an 8.5-point favorite and hasn’t lost a game all season. This is David vs. Goliath — or, in the movieHoosiers terms, the college-football equivalent of tiny Hickory vs. mighty South Bend Central, only with 20 million more people watching.

Around the city, you can feel the Indiana excitement. Miami anticipation you could already imagine, its 23-year-old quarterback Carson Beck (he was ten months from being born when the school last won a national title) looking to restore them to the greatness of five titles in 19 years.

But the sight of swarms of people in Hoosier red marching down the South Florida streets, blowing whistles and taking over bars is another thing entirely. Even, perhaps, a Hollywood thing. Indiana football had never won a national championship — in fact it’s been 34 years since it even won a bowl game. The team didn’t have a single five-star recruit this season (Miami has two). And now, thanks to no-nonsense coach Curt Cignetti and QB transfer Fernando Mendoza, so overlooked he once had to commit to Yale, the program is one win away from the ultimate Hollywood ending.

Yet standing in their way is a school with a Tinseltown pedigree of its own. The University of Miami has become a kind of factory for action-movie stars, with Dwayne Johnson, Sylvester Stallone and Ray Liotta all holding degrees from the school. In factJohnson didn’t just go to Miami but played on its 1991 national-championship football team. (He was a defensive tackle and a teammate of star offensive lineman and current coach Mario Cristobal.)For Johnson, this game is personal; he toldEntertainment Tonight at the Golden Globes last week“I can’t wait,” adding that he was “so proud of Mario” and “so proud of my boys.”

Johnson is expected to be in attendance Monday night and possibly even on the field.The actor’s presence will be felt regardless of where he is in the stadium. A $1 million donation a few years ago means the Hard Rock Stadium locker room is now branded as The“Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson Locker Room,” which might serve as a little bit of intimidation for IU players as they run past; who wants The Smashing Machine rooting against you? This is the puny underdogs against the musclebound action heroes, the working-class grinders vs. the well-oiled Ivan Dragos. In an era of big-time NIL money, when success is all about having the most flash and glam — Miami has a so-called “NIL King,” the local mogul John Ruiz, who recently paid more than $20 million to players — Indiana remains a proletarian throwback, an evocation of time when college football success was more about work than money, however fleeting that reputation might be. (The donor money is starting to pour in.)

Two of Florida’s most famous part-time residents will even turn out to the game Monday, giving it an added cinematic weight, with both President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio expected to attend.

Toss Stallone into the mix as someone with a stake in the outcome — he moved from Los Angeles to Palm Beach in 2024 and has lately been embracing his Florida side, saying the state “fits [his] personality better” than L.A.

The University of Miami even already has some screen famethanks to a hugely watched 30 for 30 about the program called The U back in 2009 and asequel five years later. Packs of Hoosier fans may be taking over the South Beach bars, but those bars are still decked out in green and orange, celebrating the school’s bruising reputation.

Indiana has a somewhat different Hollywood rep. Its most famous celebrities include Ryan Murphy, Laverne Cox and Jane Pauley. (Yesterday she dedicated a segment on CBS News Sunday Morning to the school’s enigmatic fight song.) If all the earthiness wasn’t already clear, enter the specter of John Mellencamp, Indiana’s native son, who once donated $1.5 million to build the football team’s indoor practice facility, the John Mellencamp Pavilion. Mellencamp, who lives in Bloomington, has been coming to games at Memorial Stadium since the early 1970’s, and even has achieved the working-man’s pinnacle of season tickethood: he has a shack high above the field where he can smoke and watch the games in peace.

The two places couldn’t be further apart on-screen either. Miami’s best-known TV show is Miami Vice, all pastel-sportsjacketcool and late-night beachside heat. Indiana has The Middle, a scrappy single-cam about a family that always seems to have the sink going out or the above-ground pool turning into a mudhole. (The creators of that 2010’s ABC gem,Eileen Heisler and DeAnn Heline, both attended Indiana University.)

And in case all that wasn’t enough to keep a Disney development executive busy, Indiana’s Mendoza grew up right near the University of Miami campus. Andhisfather played with Cristobal too.

But one of Indiana’s highest-profile fans isa bona fide television star. An alum of the business school, Mark Cuban has emerged as a major Indiana University donor. A decade ago the longtime Shark Tank personality gave $5 million to create theMark Cuban Center for Sports Media and Technology, where students can shoot and edit content for the school’s teams. The entertainment-world staple — he long owned not just the Dallas Mavericks but Magnolia Pictures and just took a stake in music promoter Burwoodland — has been throwing his weight around the Hoosiers program.

Cuban arrived in town Saturday night and posted up at a house in Miami, waiting to head over to the game where he’d root as nervously as every one of the tens of thousands of other Indiana fans who flew in from somewhere else. As he made his own trip from Miami Beach into Miami Monday afternoon, Cuban reflected on the difference between the football rivals.

“Miami has celebrity vibes and we have soybean vibes,” he told THR, giving a laugh. The mogul said he drew on his own experience owning an NBA team in the salary-cap era to advise on managing a college football club in the NIL one; the key, he said, was working within constraints instead of spending wildly.

“I would discuss my experience with Coach Cig and [Athletic Director] Scott Dolson and what it means to put together a team under the salary cap, where you have to fit people into roles,” Cuban said. “Sure, you can chase five-star recruits like you chase big free-agents. But winning the summer does not mean winning the games. Super teams rarely work.”

If this strategy does, he said, Indiana football would come to embody a different, distinctly American principle: that grit can be the difference between poverty and riches. “From the outhouse to the penthouse, isn’t that what it’s all about?”

Cuban — who will watch the game with IU friends in a stadium box — also noted a connection between the Hoosiers and the NFC championship-bound Rams. “I went to Indiana with Sean McVay’s mother,” he said, referencing the team’s head coach. “And I don’t know if I ever told anyone this but I had a huge crush on her. But she went on to marry Tim McVay who was a player for the IU football team so it all worked out OK,” he said giving another laugh.

The story has galvanized other people in Hollywood with IU connections. The veteran producer Nathan Ross, EP of Dallas Buyers Club and Big Little Lies and a devoted IU alum, flew from Southern California to Miami to attend the game after watching the Hoosiers destroy Alabama at the Rose Bowl three weeks ago.

“Of all the scripts I’ve read in my decades in the business I’ve never seen a story like this,” said Ross, who is talking to the university about a potential docuseries. “Indiana has been a football doormat for more than a century. And then two years ago Coach Cig shows up and suddenly they could be at the top of the mountain.”

As Pizzo prepared for the game — a tailgate Monday morning was on the agenda — he went into trash-talk mode. “I wonder how fans of the Miami football team will when there’s more Indiana fans in Hard Rock Stadium than Miami fans,” he said. (This is plausible given that, with 90,000 students, IU is five times as large as Miami, allowing them to dominate secondary ticket markets.). The screenwriter grew up near the stadium in the 1950’s and 1960’s and used to come to games with his dad. “Back then it was barely one-quarter full a lot of the time.” He paused to correct himself. “Back then and also a few years ago.”

Pizzo took a minute to imagine what a film feature about the Hoosier renaissance would look like. Perhaps, he said, it would open on Cignetti arriving at the school two years ago and seeing the program in shambles before beginning the turnaround. Pizzo has not begun writing anything, though he has spoken with some veteran filmmakers with Indiana connections about a potential nonfiction project should the team win. A lot of footage has already been shot and edited, courtesy of the Cuban Center.

Pizzo paused a moment, reflecting on why a movie about the Indiana season would make a perfect addition to the sports-film canon. “There’s something very relatable about this story of a blue-collar underdog lunch-bucket team. It represents something about this country, which is the American dream. You can pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you can reach the summit, and it’s not what you’re born with in terms of wealth or breeding,” he said, giving a confident flourish as he wound down. “Anything is possible.” Now all he needs is a Hollywood ending.