Indiana football coach Curt Cignetti speaks with reporters at Big Ten Media Day in Chicago.

The defending national champion Hoosiers head to one of college football’s most historic addresses Saturday, only now they’re the program carrying the championship pedigree.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB+WAVE) — Curt Cignetti has never been to Nebraska.

Not for a football game. Not for a recruiting trip. Not even, apparently, to see what all that corn (and flatness) is about.

“I’ve never been,” Indiana’s football coach said Monday, “... and I’m looking forward to it.”

He has heard about the place. The stadium. The fans. The history. The tradition.

Nebraska has five national championships, three Heisman Trophy winners and enough old football glory to fill a grain silo. Memorial Stadium has been one of the sport’s cathedrals for generations, a place where visiting teams once arrived with roughly the same optimism as people entering a tax audit.

Cignetti will see it for the first time Saturday. But Indiana isn’t going there to admire history. It’s bringing some of its own.

The Hoosiers arrive in Lincoln as defending national champions: 16-0 a year ago, 5-0 now and winners of 21 straight. Nebraska is 5-0, too, making this the kind of game that once would have seemed perfectly natural for Nebraska and preposterous for Indiana.

Nebraska hasn’t hosted a defending national champion since Texas came to Lincoln in 2006. This time the champion walking through the door is Indiana.

There is a sentence that would’ve gotten you checked for fever not long ago.

Cignetti didn’t spend much time Monday contemplating any of that. He generally treats history as anything that happened before the next practice.

His team had just beaten Rutgers, 47-15, on the road, rushing for 336 yards while allowing 60 and holding the Scarlet Knights to 2-14 on third and fourth downs.

It also committed zero penalties. A week earlier, the Hoosiers had committed eight for 60 yards in an uncomfortable 29-23 win over Northwestern. They had false starts before they had properly introduced themselves.

Problems under Cignetti have a remarkably short shelf life.

“Good road win Saturday night,” he said. “We did a lot of things well. Still some things to clean up.”

There always are. Indiana could win 63-0, allow negative yardage and discover a cure for the common cold at halftime, and Cignetti would come into the Monday press conference concerned about gap integrity.

That is part of what has happened here. The extraordinary has become administrative.

“I think all facets of our team are improving,” he said.

That’s the part Nebraska should worry about.

Indiana isn’t playing as though it’s trying to recreate last season. It looks increasingly like a team figuring out what this season’s version of itself can become.

The running game has begun to roar. Turbo Richard has supplied the explosiveness. Lee Beebe Jr. has supplied plenty of his own. Against Rutgers, Indiana didn’t so much run the football as establish eminent domain.

Cignetti talks about Richard’s patience and vision, his burst and acceleration, his receiving ability and pass protection.

“He’s a real weapon,” Cignetti said.

The defense hasn’t produced a pile of turnovers, which prompted a question Monday about whether that concerned him.

Not particularly.

“I think we’re giving up 10 points a game maybe,” he said.

Two fourth-down stops, he noted, are effectively turnovers anyway. Sacks and tackles for loss create field position. Indiana is on the positive side of the turnover margin.

No crisis was declared.

So the Hoosiers go to Lincoln for the first truly heavyweight road assignment of their title defense.

Nebraska is no nostalgia act. Matt Rhule’s team averages more than 43 points per game and has rediscovered the running game that used to be included in the state’s agricultural output. Cignetti called what he saw on film “extremely impressive.”

He knows quarterback Anthony Colandrea, too. Cignetti faced him when Colandrea was a freshman at Virginia and Cignetti was coaching James Madison. Now Colandrea is older, dangerous with his arm and legs, and running an offense Cignetti plainly respects.

“We’ll have to do a great job of caging this guy and putting pressure on him,” he said.

Nebraska has spent years trying to get back into games like this, back into the national conversation, back to Saturdays when Memorial Stadium felt like the center of the college football world.

Rhule may finally have it there.

That’s what makes Saturday so fascinating. The visitor walking in won’t be overwhelmed by the red jerseys, the sellout crowd and all those ghosts.

The last time these teams played, in 2024, Indiana beat Nebraska 56-7 in Bloomington. It was one of the afternoons when the rest of the country began realizing that whatever Cignetti was building wasn’t cute anymore.

Two years later, nobody needs convincing.

Cignetti finally gets to see Nebraska: the stadium and the crowd and all the evidence of what made it one of America’s great football programs.

Nebraska, meanwhile, gets a look at what Indiana is now.

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CRAWFORD | Cignetti takes Indiana to Nebraska, and college football history has changed sides