Indiana football has won two previous Big Ten championships. Here’s how

No. 2 Indiana is set to play No. 1 Ohio State in the Big Ten Football Championship game at 8 p.m. ET next Saturday night at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana.

The game will serve as the Hoosiers’ first shot at a Big Ten Championship in several decades. Indiana has two Big Ten titles to its name, each coming in the 20th century under rather interesting circumstances. Here are the stories of the 1945 and 1967 Indiana Hoosiers, the program’s last conference champions:

The 1945 Indiana Hoosiers

• Final AP Ranking: No. 4

• Final Record: 9-0-1 (5-0-1 Big Ten)

Your eyes aren’t deceiving you, that’s a college football record with three columns in it.

Yes, the 1945 Hoosiers did in fact finish the season “undefeated” in the sense that they did not lose a game. Indiana did, however, see one game end in a tie: a 7-7 tussle with none other than Northwestern in the second game of the season.

Indiana’s 1945 roster was an interesting collection of recent college grads and World War II veterans led by Bo McMillin, the program’s last head coach to have left Bloomington with a winning record. This roster included a plethora of names including George Taliaferro, Pete Pihos and Russell “Mutt” Deal, father of program stalwart Mark Deal.

The Hoosiers opened the season on the road at Michigan in a matchup that would later prove pivotal. Indiana left Ann Arbor with a 13-7 victory after stopping the Wolverines in the shadow of their own goalline with just 20 seconds to play. The game would be Michigan’s sole loss in conference play.

The younger Deal penned a longer story on the 1945 Hoosiers that I highly suggest you read.

The 1967 Indiana Hoosiers

• Final AP Ranking: No. 6

• Final Record: 9-2 (6-1 Big Ten)

This is the one you’ve almost certainly heard at least a bit about if you’ve been anywhere around Indiana for any length of time.

The 1966 Hoosiers had finished the season firmly in the Big Ten’s basement, going 1-8-1 with a single win in Big Ten play (at Northwestern, funny enough) during head coach John Pont’s second season leading the program. Indiana struggled mightily down the stretch with a narrow 7-0 road loss to Ohio State, a 37-19 trouncing at home by Michigan State and an unfortunate 51-6 road drubbing against rival Purdue.

Curt Cignetti’s turnaround is among the greatest in the history of college football, but it wasn’t the first one-season flip at Indiana. Pont turned 1-8-1 into 9-2, going from “rags to roses” with a berth in the 1968 Rose Bowl against Pac-8 power USC and Heisman Trophy winner O.J. Simpson.

All of Indiana’s victories came by narrow margins with the lone exception of a midseason 42-7 blowout on the road against Arizona. The Hoosiers’ lone loss was a 33-7 pummeling at the hands of Minnesota.

Indiana, Purdue and Minnesota finished atop the conference with records of 6-1. Each had gone 1-1 against the other two. Purdue was ineligible to play in the Rose Bowl since it’d appeared in the previous season’s edition and the next tie-breaker fell on which team had gone the longest without an appearance in the game, which gave the nod to Indiana, which had been to Pasadena zero times.