{"id":708376,"date":"2026-01-19T19:10:15","date_gmt":"2026-01-19T16:10:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/the-indiana-miami-game-is-the-hollywood-tangle-we-didnt-know-we-needed\/"},"modified":"2026-01-19T19:10:15","modified_gmt":"2026-01-19T16:10:15","slug":"the-indiana-miami-game-is-the-hollywood-tangle-we-didnt-know-we-needed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/the-indiana-miami-game-is-the-hollywood-tangle-we-didnt-know-we-needed\/","title":{"rendered":"The Indiana-Miami Game Is the Hollywood Tangle We Didn\u2019t Know We Needed"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\tThe 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. \u201cIt feels like we\u2019re taking over all of Miami,\u201d he mused as his car shot down Florida\u2019s Turnpike past Hard Rock Stadium.<\/p>\n

\n\tPizzo, who wrote Rudy <\/em>and Hoosiers<\/em>, is the bard of Indiana sports movies<\/a> \u2014 perhaps the bard of all<\/em> sports movies. He sees in the college-football title game<\/a> between long-neglected Indiana and once-great Miami a quintessential Hollywood tale. \u201cWe\u2019re the ultimate underdog story,\u201d said Pizzo, who lives in Bloomington. \u201cThe school nobody gave a chance to from the \u2018flyover\u2019 state against a powerhouse.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOn 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\u2019t lost a game all season. This is David vs. Goliath \u2014 or, in the movie\u00a0Hoosiers<\/em> terms, the college-football equivalent of tiny Hickory vs. mighty South Bend Central, only with 20 million more people watching.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAround 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut 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 \u2014 in fact it\u2019s been 34 years since it even won a bowl game. The team didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tYet 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 fact\u00a0Johnson didn\u2019t 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.)\u00a0\u00a0For Johnson, this game is personal; he told\u00a0Entertainment Tonight<\/em> at the Golden Globes last week\u00a0\u201cI can\u2019t wait,\u201d adding that he was\u00a0 \u201cso proud of Mario\u201d and \u201cso proud of my boys.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tJohnson is expected to be in attendance Monday night and possibly even on the field.\u00a0The actor\u2019s 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\u00a0\u201cDwayne \u2018The Rock\u2019 Johnson Locker Room,\u201d 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 \u2014 Miami has a so-called \u201cNIL King,\u201d the local mogul John Ruiz<\/a>, who recently paid more than $20 million to players \u2014 Indiana remains a proletarian throwback, an evocation of time when college football success was more about work than money, however fleeting that image might be. (The donor money is starting to pour in.) <\/p>\n

\n\tTwo of Florida\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd toss Stallone into the mix as someone with a stake in the outcome \u2014 he moved from Los Angeles to Palm Beach in 2024 and has lately been embracing his Florida side, saying the state \u201cfits [his] personality better\u201d than L.A.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe University of Miami even already has some screen fame\u00a0thanks to a hugely watched 30 for 30<\/em> about the program called The U<\/em> back in 2009 and a\u00a0sequel 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\u2019s bruising reputation.<\/p>\n

\n\tIndiana has a somewhat different Hollywood rep. Its most famous celebrities include Ryan Murphy, Laverne Cox and Jane Pauley. (Yesterday she dedicated a segment<\/a> on CBS News<\/a> Sunday Morning <\/em>to the school\u2019s enigmatic fight song.) If all the earthiness wasn\u2019t already clear, enter the specter of John Mellencamp, Indiana\u2019s native son, who once donated $1.5 million to build the football team\u2019s indoor practice facility, the John Mellencamp Pavilion. Mellencamp, who lives in Bloomington, has been coming to games at Memorial Stadium since the early 1970\u2019s, and even has achieved the working-man\u2019s pinnacle of season tickethood: he has a shack high above the field where he can smoke and watch the games in peace.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe two places couldn\u2019t be further apart on-screen either. Miami\u2019s best-known TV show is Miami Vice<\/em>, all pastel-sportsjacket\u00a0cool and late-night beachside heat. Indiana has The Middle<\/em>, a scrapp<\/a>y 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\u2019s ABC gem,\u00a0Eileen Heisler and DeAnn Heline, both attended Indiana University.)<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd in case all that wasn\u2019t enough to keep a Disney development executive busy, Indiana\u2019s Mendoza grew up right near the University of Miami campus. And\u00a0his\u00a0father<\/em> played with Cristobal too.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut one of Indiana\u2019s highest-profile fans is\u00a0a 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 <\/em>personality gave $5 million to create the\u00a0Mark Cuban Center for Sports Media<\/a> and Technology<\/a>, where students can shoot and edit content for the school\u2019s teams. The entertainment-world staple \u2014 he long owned not just the Dallas Mavericks but Magnolia Pictures and just took a stake in music promoter Burwoodland \u2014 has been throwing his weight around the Hoosiers program.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tCuban arrived in town Saturday night and posted up at a house in Miami, waiting to head over to the game where he\u2019d root as nervously as every one of the tens of thousands of other Indiana fans who flew in from somewhere else.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Pizzo prepared for the game \u2014 a tailgate Monday morning was on the agenda \u2014 he went into trash-talk mode. \u201cI wonder how fans of the Miami football team will when there\u2019s more Indiana fans in Hard Rock Stadium than Miami fans,\u201d 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\u2019s and 1960\u2019s and used to come to games with his dad. \u201cBack then it was barely one-quarter full a lot of the time.\u201d He paused to correct himself. \u201cBack then and also a few years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPizzo 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tPizzo paused a moment, reflecting on why a movie about the Indiana season would make a perfect addition to the sports-film canon. \u201cThere\u2019s 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\u2019s not what you\u2019re born with in terms of wealth or breeding,\u201d he said, giving a confident flourish as he wound down. \u201cAnything is possible.\u201d Now all he needs is a Hollywood ending.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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. \u201cIt feels like we\u2019re taking over all of Miami,\u201d he mused as his car shot down Florida\u2019s Turnpike past Hard Rock Stadium. Pizzo,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":708377,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/GettyImages-2256171262.jpg?w=1440&h=810&crop=1","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[70236,4941,39974,2837,75416,70954],"class_list":["post-708376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-mediaa","tag-college-football","tag-donald-trump","tag-dwayne-johnson","tag-espn","tag-indiana","tag-miami"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/708376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=708376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/708376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/708377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=708376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=708376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=708376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}