Coffee with Crawford | A different winter: On the road with Indiana's championship detour | IU Sports

MIAMI, Fla. (WDRB) — This is a new situation. I never figured I’d be covering a college football national championship game. No offense to Louisville or Kentucky. I guess I never ruled out Louisville getting here one day. I figured they’d make a playoff, and then you never know.

Indiana, though? That was too unthinkable to even consider. And if it did happen, Rick Bozich would’ve boxed me out like a power forward on a point guard. An IU alum, he’d have been on it like cream on crimson. And knocking it out of the park.

But here we are.

It’s sunny and 80 in Miami this morning, but my being here is the result of a perfect storm: Curt Cignetti showing up and turning Indiana into a national juggernaut. My winter rhythm already thrown off by Rick’s retirement. And suddenly this incredible (and I mean that literally) story taking over everything.

What Indiana has done isn’t just rare. It’s almost impossible. And it’s been a privilege to write about this coach and team all season, and to cover Fernando Mendoza’s rise to the Heisman Trophy, one of two Heisman winners I’ve gotten to cover.

Louisville | Kentucky | Indiana | Eric Crawford

This journey has taken me, with WDRB’s Haley Schoengart (and in the final two stops, with Dalton Godbey and videographer Frank Stamper) from Indianapolis, to Los Angeles, to Atlanta, to Miami.

Literally from one coast to the other.

It’s been the best kind of story. One with applications far beyond sport. From a column getting inside the mind of Mendoza to considering the leadership applications of what Cignetti has managed in taking the program with the most losses in major college football to a No. 1 ranking and the doorstep of a national championship in just two seasons.

It’s also meant some Louisville and Kentucky games basketball have gone unaddressed by me, which, if you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know is like telling a fish to avoid water. Doing all of it is in my DNA. Overdoing it is, too.

So I’ve been trying to focus on where I am for the moment. Because the moment is Curt Cignetti and Mario Cristobal getting ready to talk for the last time before their teams meet Monday night at Hard Rock Stadium.

I’m sitting here writing, taking pictures, looking at an IU helmet perched where Cignetti will sit with the words “National Championship” hanging in the background.

That’s a pretty amazing thing.

One thing I’ve learned from this Indiana team, and just about every great team I’ve covered, is that they are unshakably focused on the present day, the present task, the boring stuff.

We write all of these storylines, but the real storyline of success is pretty darn boring. It’s minutiae. It’s preparation. It’s all the things we don’t see, and even if we could see them, we’d likely overlook them. It’s repetition. It’s practicing the right way. It’s the kind of focus we don’t see much anymore in a day when we’re all glancing at phones 10 times a minute.

It’s commitment and focus and discipline like few of us know and most of us aspire to.

A thousand little lessons. One of which is to focus on today. The next story. The next rep.

And soon enough, I’ll settle back into the normal winter rhythm, after one more night of watching the impossible try to become real.