Fourth down from the Miami 12, nine minutes left in the national championship game. Curt Cignetti sends his kicker out, then calls timeout and waves him off. Fernando Mendoza runs a quarterback draw into the end zone. Indiana football goes on to beat Miami 27-21 on January 19, 2026, finishing the first 16-0 season since Yale in 1894.
Indiana started that season with 715 losses, more than any program in college football history.
Fifty-nine years earlier, Indiana did something nearly as unlikely. Almost nobody outside Bloomington remembers it. A program that won one game in 1960 shared the 1967 Big Ten title and played the No. 1 team in America in the Rose Bowl. Eight of its games were decided in the final four minutes. It had a sophomore quarterback who faked a field goal with the season on the line, and a sophomore punter who twice refused to punt.
They called them the Cardiac Kids.
How John Pont Rebuilt Indiana Football
John Pont arrived in 1965 from Yale, where he went 12-5-1. Before that he spent seven years at Miami of Ohio, going 43-22-2 with two MAC titles. He was 37, a Canton, Ohio, halfback who had played for Woody Hayes and Ara Parseghian. His No. 42 was the first jersey Miami ever retired.
Indiana had gone 20-41-2 in seven seasons under Phil Dickens. Pont’s first team went 2-8. His second went 1-8-1. Both finished ninth in a 10-team league. In November 1966, Purdue beat them 51-6 in front of 62,000 people.
Three wins in two seasons. Indiana kept him anyway.
Freshmen were ineligible then, so all through 1966 Pont’s freshmen practiced against his varsity. Three of them mattered. Harry Gonso was a quarterback from Findlay, Ohio. John Isenbarger, from Muncie Central, was also a quarterback, and he could run, catch and punt. Jade Butcher grew up a few miles from campus at Bloomington High School. Butcher would catch 10 touchdown passes in each of his three varsity seasons, a Big Ten record 30 in all.
Gonso and Isenbarger fought for the quarterback job all preseason. Gonso won it less than two weeks before the opener. Pont moved Isenbarger to tailback, which created a runner who could take the option pitch and still throw it.
Pont also moved his captain, offensive tackle Doug Crusan, to defensive tackle. He asked what Crusan weighed. About 275, Crusan said. Report in August at 235, Pont told him. Crusan, linebacker Ken Kaczmarek and fullback Terry Cole were seniors who had stuck around through 3-16-1. Indiana entered the season unranked.
Nine Wins, Almost None of Them Safe
Indiana won nine games in 1967. Seven came by a touchdown or less. The average regular-season score was roughly 19-14. Only one Saturday, a 42-7 win at Arizona, let anyone in crimson relax.
The defense would not allow the last score. At Illinois, Brown Marks forced a fumble at the Indiana 12 to protect a 13-7 lead. Against winless Wisconsin, the Badgers’ final pass from inside the 10 sailed out of the end zone.
The offense woke up late. Kentucky led the opener 10-0 at halftime, and Pont drop-kicked the film projector. Gonso’s winning touchdown came on fourth down, deflected into the hands of tight end Al Gage. Indiana missed both extra points and won 12-10 anyway. Against Kansas, with the regular kicker hurt, defensive back Dave Kornowa kicked the game-winning field goal. At Michigan State, Isenbarger’s late touchdown and Kornowa’s extra point beat the team that had shared the national title a year earlier, 14-13.
Gonso made it work, throwing for 931 yards and running for 512.
Punt, John, Punt
The third ingredient was improvisation, and nobody improvised like Isenbarger.
Against Iowa, Indiana led late and faced fourth-and-15. Isenbarger dropped back to punt and decided, on his own, to run. He gained a yard. Iowa went ahead 17-14. Indiana drove back, and on fourth-and-12 the field goal unit came out with Gonso holding. He stood up and ran for the first down. A few plays later he hit Butcher for the winning touchdown with 53 seconds left.
A week later at Michigan, Indiana led 20-0 before Michigan tied it. During that rally, Isenbarger ran from punt formation at his own 13 again. He didn’t make it.
Pont grabbed him by the shirt and told him he would never play another down for Indiana University.
About a minute later, Gonso walked over to his coach. He didn’t think they could win without Isenbarger. Play him now, he said. Punish him some other way.
Pont agreed. Indiana drove 85 yards in the final two minutes, and Isenbarger scored from the 1. Indiana 27, Michigan 20.
Back in Muncie, Isenbarger’s mother sent her son a short telegram asking him to please punt. The phrase escaped. “Punt, John, Punt” bumper stickers covered southern Indiana, and Sports Illustrated put the three words on a Dan Jenkins story in November.
It never went away. In November 2016, a member of the Isenbarger family filed a federal trademark application on the phrase. The list of goods included T-shirts, caps, a gift package with a coffee mug and tote bag, and fire-retardant pajamas for babies and toddlers. Nobody answered the examiner’s letter, and it was declared abandoned in October 2017.
The Bucket and the Vote
Indiana reached 8-0 and fifth in the country before Minnesota beat them 33-7. Indiana, Purdue and Minnesota all headed for 6-1 in the league. There was no title game and no tiebreaker. The Big Ten voted on who went to Pasadena. Purdue was out under the no-repeat rule. Indiana had never gone, not once since 1887.
Beat Purdue, and Indiana goes.
Purdue was ranked third, with Leroy Keyes and Mike Phipps. It had beaten USC in the Rose Bowl 11 months earlier and beaten Indiana by 45. Indiana was a two-touchdown underdog at home.
Gonso told the story for 50 years. The sky over Bloomington was gray, until the clouds broke just before kickoff. He decided the sun was for him.
Indiana forced a Phipps fumble, and Gonso hit Butcher for a touchdown. Mike Krivoshia scored another. Then Purdue fumbled again, and Cole ran 63 yards up a middle Purdue had left open to stop the option. Indiana led 19-7 at the half. Cole finished with 155 yards on 15 carries.
Purdue made it 19-14 and drove inside the Indiana 5 late. Kaczmarek hit fullback Perry Williams, the ball came loose, and Mike Baughman recovered at the 2.
Then Isenbarger, the punter who wouldn’t punt, stood in his own end zone with the Rose Bowl on the line. He kicked it 63 yards. Purdue’s last drive died near the Indiana 23. Indiana 19, Purdue 14. The Big Ten voted a few hours later.
Pasadena
On January 1, 1968, nearly 103,000 people watched fourth-ranked Indiana face top-ranked USC and a junior tailback named O.J. Simpson. Curt Gowdy and Paul Christman called it on NBC. About 25,000 Indiana fans made the trip.
Simpson scored in the first quarter. Indiana reached the USC 10 in the second and settled for a Kornowa field goal. Simpson scored again in the third. Indiana’s last threat died at the USC 5, when Mike Battle broke Eric Stolberg’s ribs as the pass arrived. USC 14, Indiana 3.
Simpson ran 25 times for 128 yards. USC threw just nine passes. Kornowa’s field goal stood for 58 years as the only points an Indiana player ever scored in a Rose Bowl. Decades later, Gonso said they were in it but made too many mistakes.
Pont was named national coach of the year by every organization that gave the award.
The Long Wait for Indiana Football
Indiana went 6-4 in 1968 and 4-6 in 1969. Pont left for Northwestern after 1972, and Indiana went back to being Indiana. The 1967 team became the kind of history that lives at reunions.
Crusan started at tackle for the 17-0 Miami Dolphins in 1972. Cole won an NFL title with Baltimore, went home to Mitchell, and had the high school field named after him. He died in 2005 at 60. Pont died in 2008 at 80. No Indiana coach went back to the Rose Bowl for 58 years.
Isenbarger died in March 2024 at 76. Butcher died in Bloomington barely a month later, also at 76. It was 21 months before Indiana won the national championship. Neither of them saw it.
On December 6, 2025, Indiana beat Ohio State 13-10 for its first Big Ten title since 1967. On January 1, 2026, it beat Alabama 38-3 for its first Rose Bowl win. Eighteen days later, the Hoosiers were national champions.
On January 8, the night before Indiana played Oregon, a reporter called Doug Crusan. He was 79, living in Fishers, the captain of the only other Indiana team that ever got close. He said this team could win it all. Then he said they should.
Eleven days later, they did. It just took 59 years.