The Hoosier tenderloin is the breaded pork tenderloin wearing Indiana's own name for itself, and the name is the point of this entry rather than the engineering. "Hoosier" is what Indianans call themselves, and attaching it to the tenderloin marks the sandwich as a state possession the way "po' boy" belongs to New Orleans or "beef on weck" to Buffalo. The pounded, breaded, fried pork cutlet that overhangs its bun by inches is the same object under either label. What the Hoosier name carries is ownership: this is the sandwich Indiana points to, served at supper clubs, county fairs, drive-ins, and small-town diners across the state as a default lunch rather than a novelty, and the local term signals that belonging more than it describes a different build.
The craft worth noting here is where the sandwich actually lives, because that is what the regional name encodes. This is a tavern and diner sandwich first, made to a familiar template by cooks who do not need a recipe: a pork loin cutlet beaten thin and wide, breaded into a craggy shell, fried hard, and dropped onto a small soft bun it dwarfs on every side. The bun is a handle and a center bite, not a structural partner, and the build openly concedes the bread is outmatched. Dressed with the cold sharp basics, pickle, mustard, raw onion, lettuce, it is eaten by working in from the overhang toward the part that is technically a sandwich. In Indiana this is unremarkable, which is exactly the condition a true regional specialty depends on: it is interesting elsewhere precisely because at home it is ordinary.
The variations are codified around the cut and the cook, not the name. The grilled version drops the breading for a leaner charred sandwich that eats completely differently; the cracker-crumb coating runs against the seasoned-flour coating as regional preference; the loaded build piles on cheese and the works while the oversized cutlet stays fixed. Those belong to the dense long tail of regional American specialties and each deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.