On Monday night, head coach Curt Cignetti, Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Fernando Mendoza, and the Indiana Hoosiers completed a dream season to win the NCAA College Football Playoff National Championship 27-21 over the Miami Hurricanes.
Indiana's turnaround under Cignetti over the past two seasons has been described as so remarkable that there is no comparison for it in the history of any other level of any sport. But oh, there very much is.
Before the Hoosiers went from the all-time losingest program in college football to national champs in two years, the NASCAR Cup Series had its own version of Indiana's improbable rise. The team was Furniture Row Racing.
Martin Truex Jr., Cole Pearn, and Furniture Row Racing were Indiana football on wheels
From the moment Barney Visser's organization entered the NASCAR Cup Series, something was always different about Furniture Row. It was operated out of Denver, Colorado rather than with the rest of the grid in the Charlotte area. It ran plain black matte paint schemes with its namesake store chain serving as the "sponsor".
For many years, the team struggled to qualify for races, let alone to compete near the front. Furniture Row slowly began improving in the early 2010s, as Regan Smith scored a surprise win at Darlington Raceway in 2011 and Kurt Busch qualified for the Chase for the Cup in 2013. Still, nobody could have foreseen anything remotely close to what was coming next.
Capitalizing on Busch's success, Furniture Row landed Martin Truex Jr. in 2014 after he'd lost his ride and sponsor at Michael Waltrip Racing as part of the fallout from the "Spingate" scandal at Richmond Raceway in 2013. Once a highly touted prospect, the New Jersey native had been held back by multiple dysfunctional race teams and simply needed a home where he could reach his fullest potential.
Truex's first season with the team was unmemorable, but then along came crew chief Cole Pearn, the Cignetti of Furniture Row's story. The Canadian engineering whiz was brash and eccentric, and all he did was build rocketships. Google him.
In 2015, Truex scored a career-high 22 top 10 finishes and qualified for the Championship 4, finishing fourth in the standings. Then, if there was any idea that his season was a fluke, he got even better the next year, winning four times and leading a series-high 1,809 laps as the organization switched manufacturers to Toyota.
A blown engine at Talladega Superspeedway in the fall doomed Furniture Row's title hopes, but the best was still yet to come. In 2017, Truex won eight times and led the Cup Series in just about every conceivable metric. He capped it off by holding serve against a hard-charging Kyle Busch in the closing laps at Homestead-Miami Speedway, capturing the Cup Series championship for an organization that had once been a complete afterthought.
Sadly, the success wasn't enough to overcome Furniture Row's budget constraints, and Visser was forced to shut the operation down after 2018. Still, it remains one of the most stunning rags-to-riches stories in NASCAR history, one that may never be replicated as long as the sport exists.
In 2007, when NASCAR's field depth reached its all-time peak from a team perspective, Furniture Row's No. 78 machine might have been the slowest car on the grid. Ten years later, Visser, Pearn, and Truex were hoisting the biggest trophy that American stock car racing has to offer.
Indiana football's journey is one of the greatest organizational builds in all of American sports, but it's not entirely unprecedented. NASCAR fans will never forget about the time when a journeyman driver, an enigmatic crew chief, and a little team from Colorado did what many considered impossible.