BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — On the practice fields of West Virginia University, in the late 1970s, the son of the Mountaineers head football coach served as a problematic scout team quarterback.
Frank Cignetti’s boy insisted on throwing passes to whoever he wanted, disregarding the scout team cue cards that a young assistant coach named Nick Saban flashed toward him. An angry Saban kept reminding Curt Cignetti to follow the play as drawn on the play cards with the intended receiver circled.
This is where you throw the ball!
“He was such a competitive guy, he wanted to beat the defense,” Saban remembers. “He’d throw it wherever he thought he had the best chance to make a play.”
Saban was there to remind Curt that this wasn’t a pro football tryout.
“You ain’t gonna make the New York Jets down here!” Saban once snapped at him.
More than 40 years later, that young, feisty scout team quarterback sits on a leather couch in his new office within Indiana’s football stadium. He’s now 63 years old, is finally a head coach in major college football and is in the midst of leading the Hoosiers to the greatest season in school history — the architect of one of the most improbable turnarounds ever witnessed in the sport.
Curt Cignetti still commands that competitive fire of his youth. In fact, he doesn’t act (or look) like he’s in his 60s. He still bucks societal norms. He doesn’t really play by your rules.
For instance, did you see his comments last December when, before coaching a single game, he bad-mouthed his new Big Ten rivals? How about in July, when he claimed the Hoosiers would reach the conference championship game? Or what about just last week, when he referred to the program as an “emerging superpower.”
He’s boastful and he’s brash. He’ll tell you that he’ll beat you and then he’ll do it. After all, he’s won seven conference or division championships in 13 years as a head coach at the Division II, FCS and Group of Five levels. He’s taken risks that few coaches would consider, worked at places no one wanted to go and won at schools that few have.
For all of his bold blustering, he’s quite charming in person, kind and welcoming but as confident a man as you’ll meet. In fact, the way his wife tells it, Curt predicted last November that the Hoosiers would win the first 10 games of his inaugural season before he even accepted the job.
“Don’t you remember saying that?” she asked him recently.
“Uh, no,” he replied.
Maybe Curt Cignetti is a sort-of soothsayer or perhaps he was just that confident in his ability to overhaul a roster by bringing in 27 transfer players, most of them, like the coach himself, from the Group of Five level, and all of them playing with a I-belong-here attitude as they mow through a manageable schedule.
“It’s not as much a surprise to me as it is for everyone else,” he confidently boasts.
But this? Surely, he couldn’t have expected this: nine wins by double figures; a defense surrendering the second-best yards-per-play rate in the country (4.1); an offense that’s scored more touchdowns than anyone else (57); a No. 5 ranking; a school-record win streak.
Indiana, the basketball school with the famous candy-striped shorts, the Big Ten’s football cellar-dweller, is involved in college football’s premier game of the weekend. That is a shocking revelation of historic proportions.
For the first time in their history, the Hoosiers will play in a top-five football game Saturday when they travel to meet No. 2 Ohio State in Columbus — a matchup, one might describe, between major college football’s biggest historical loser and its biggest historical winner.
“Well,” says Saban, “they’re going to have their hands full this week.”
Indiana’s change of approach, Cignetti hire
For Pete Yonkman, the march to this point for Indiana football began more than a year ago. That’s when school administrators answered an important question.
How much should we really be investing in football?
“We weren’t having a great season. By that point, it was obvious that if you didn’t have great NIL opportunities, it was going to be hard,” said Yonkman, president of a medical device company and a longtime IU booster who chairs the school’s NIL collective. “There were a lot of folks who said, ‘Maybe we should just give up on football and focus on basketball.’”
For athletic director Scott Dolson, that was not an option.
The sport of football continues to distance itself from all others as the revenue-generating giant driving the most transformative time in the industry. Behind the conference realignment shifts, billion-dollar television contracts and athlete compensation debate is a common denominator: football.
The biggest football brands are consolidating to strike richer football-rooted television deals, a portion of which will, ultimately, be distributed to football players.
De-investing in football, or even remaining at status quo, is a risky endeavor for athletic departments that so heavily rely on its revenues to operate other sports and, soon enough, need it to produce enough cash to dispense to athletes as part of the House settlement-related revenue sharing beginning next fall.
In so many words, says Yonkman, without a successful football program, it is difficult to have success in all other sports, including basketball. That’s a message he used with donors last fall and winter when he helped double IU’s NIL collective budget to, he says, the “high single-digit millions,” a move that funded Cignetti’s program-changing transfer portal haul.
“It’s no secret that football brings in 80% or more of revenue to our athletic department,” Yonkman said. “If you’re not competitive in football, we stand a chance of being left behind.”
Left behind?
As media giants shift more of their revenues toward successful football programs and as conferences further reward their members with football-related initiatives, those not excelling, or investing, in the sport operate in fear of the ramifications. Washington State president Kirk Schulz, his school quite literally left behind in the Pac-12, describes it as a “curing of conferences,” a concept that many within the industry expect to continue: bigger brands leaving behind their little brothers as the industry evolves.
Without mentioning it specifically, Dolson seems to realize this fact.
“In the Big Ten, you need to be relevant in football to be a relevant member in your conference,” he says. “We don’t take for granted that we’re always a long-standing member of the Big Ten. We want to pay our fair share and be a valued member in football.”
To that end, the investments began, the most recent of which was announced over the weekend: a new, eight-year contract for Cignetti that doubles his salary to $8 million with further resource commitments, such as stadium enhancements and athlete and staff compensation.
But before all that, the school paid $15.5 million to fire coach Tom Allen, increased the staff salary pool for Cignetti and doubled that NIL budget.
However, the most important investment may not have been an investment at all. A comprehensive study that the university commissioned on its football program produced an area needing improvement: scheduling. It was time to schedule more strategically.
For instance, Dolson says, Indiana was originally scheduled to play at Louisville this season. The school paid $1 million to cancel the game, replacing an ACC opponent on the road for an FCS opponent at home, Western Illinois, which IU beat 77-3.
“This is part of a plan,” Dolson now says.
In a tiff of irony, Indiana’s schedule this season is at the center of controversy. The schedule ranks as the easiest of any power conference program vying for a berth in the 12-team playoff.
Currently, just one of its first 10 opponents holds a winning record (6-5 Washington) — a product of both the Big Ten’s expansion to 18 teams (IU misses most of those teams in the top half) and a disappointing season from their last opponent, defending national champion Michigan (5-5).
The schedule has come under fire, from both large swaths of fans and directly from the College Football Playoff committee, whose members factor in schedule strength. Ohio State is likely to represent the Hoosiers’ only ranked challenge of the regular season.
Could an 11-1 Indiana be left out of the postseason?
“Week-in and week-out, it’s ‘Who have they played?’” said Aiden Fisher, Indiana’s star linebacker. “After each game, we’re like ‘What are they going to say now?!’”
A smirking Fisher gestures toward the Ohio State game. “In about a week, I’d love to hear what people have to say after that.”
Saban, Cignetti and breaking the basketball school mold
Curt Cignetti’s office is pristine.
Everything is in its rightful place.
Atop his desk, papers are perfectly stacked. No edge bent. No angle off.
He is neat, clean and orderly.
“I’m a real organized, structured, borderline OCD kind of guy,” Cignetti says.
Through the years, some of Nick Saban’s best assistants were the obsessive-compulsive types. They are normally driven to pay great attention to detail, he says.
Some 30 years after he joined Frank Cignetti’s staff at West Virginia, Saban hired the man’s son to join him in 2007 to start building the Alabama football program. For four years, Curt Cignetti served as Bama’s recruiting coordinator and receivers coach, tutoring the likes of Julio Jones and helping the Crimson Tide win two SEC titles and the 2009 national championship.
Cignetti describes the four-year stretch as a “doctorate level course” in building a program, from the structure, organization, practice, in-game philosophy and, maybe most important, “how to keep people on their toes when they’re winning all the time.”
Cignetti talks a lot like Saban. He uses the lingo, the buzz words, the vocabulary.
Process. Accountability. Standards.
Improving daily. Mental approach. Never satisfied.
Like Saban, he’s demanding, too. Certain things fluster and frustrate him, much like his former boss.
Take for instance his first few days in Bloomington, when he detected an obvious level of doubt about the football program’s future. Sewed deeply into the fabric here is a level of losing that virtually no other major conference program can claim: three winning seasons in nearly three decades.
Cignetti arrived on campus in early December to a community suffering from another post-traumatic episode after another losing year. They had already moved on to basketball season. In fact, one of his first questions as the football coach was about basketball.
Boy, says Yonkman, that really got him fired up.
It made him mad enough that he marched over to the basketball arena and delivered those now-famous comments in the middle of a game.
“I’ve never taken a backseat to anybody and don’t plan on starting now,” he said, pausing for dramatic effect as the crowd roared.
“Purdue sucks! But so does Michigan and Ohio State!”
It signaled a confidence not seen around here in years, perhaps even decades. The expectations and the culture began to change. And that’s not easy. Even Yonkman acknowledges that he’d “gotten that way” about football.
Around here, he says, “You literally have to shake that out of people.”
Consider it shaken.
“There was sort of a dark cloud lingering over the football program here,” Cignetti says. “A lot of people had given up on it, to be honest with you. That sort of attitude permeated people outside the university, too. I could sense it talking to the media. It was my first day here. I could just feel it and I didn’t like it. I wasn’t going to have any of it.”
He wasn’t done.
After his very first game of the season, Cignetti pulled a page from the Saban book. He publicly chided fans for leaving at halftime of the win over Florida International.
“We’ve got to keep the people in the seats,” he told reporters.
These two, Saban and Cignetti, share plenty more. At the center of that is their bond with one man: the now-departed Frank Cignetti.
Saban calls Frank “the best recruiter I was ever around.” His presentations during in-home visits and his organization were the best Saban had seen at that point in his career. His son is a lot like dad, he says: a heck of a recruiter who is “football intuitive” and “always inquisitive of how to do something better.”
It’s the non-football piece that separates the good coaches from the great ones, the stuff off the field.
Cignetti is always searching to find motivation for himself and his team, for instance, always emphasizing the psychological part of the game. In another Saban staple, Cignetti says football is 95% “between the ears.”
“I’ve always functioned best when I got a chip on my shoulder,” he says, “and I do my best weekly to find one if it doesn’t exist already.”
He doesn’t have to look very far. And neither does his team.
Cignetti and the ‘G5 All-Stars’
In July, media voters picked Indiana to finish 17th of 18 Big Ten teams.
No one here has forgotten it.
“They said we had too many Group of Five players,” Fisher, the linebacker, bemoans. “We’ve put that in the back of our mind. We remember it.”
One thing is certain: Indiana’s transfer portal haul, while incredibly productive, was derived almost exclusively from the Group of Five level. Of the 27 transfers, 21 came from the FCS or G5 ranks, with 13 of those following Cignetti from his former school, James Madison.
Twenty of them have been major contributors. Indiana’s top four tacklers are first-year transfers. So are the top four rushers and the top four receivers. Its leader in sacks is a transfer, Mikail Kamara, and its long snapper is a transfer, too. Starting tight end? Transfer. Starting quarterback? Transfer.
Cignetti’s takeover and subsequent roster overhaul was business-like, says Kurtis Rourke, the team’s quarterback from Ohio who’s thrown for 21 touchdowns to four picks this year.
“He started to weed out who was going to help or hurt the team,” Rourke says. “He didn’t care about feelings. He wanted to set a tone and develop a culture. He earned a lot of respect from us.”
The buzz in Bloomington is palpable. Dolson refers to the football program as a “sleeping giant” that just needed a hard nudge. “We’ve got a strong alumni base that has been waiting for football to have a season like this,” he said.
Now they are downright giddy. Just a few weeks ago, while Fisher ate with his mother at a local restaurant, a man screamed across the venue, “Hey, Aiden. You want a beer?!”
Rourke can’t even order pizza under his real name. He showed up at the pizza place to guffawing restaurant workers.
It’s really you!?
Fisher and the rest of the JMU group “facilitated” the change in culture here, Cignetti says — perhaps a reason it has happened so quickly. They knew the process, the culture, the expectation. Cignetti works quickly and efficiently. Practices rarely go much longer than 90 minutes. Punctuality is key.
The group of transfers has a sort-of nickname for themselves: the Group of Five All-Stars.
“We’ve all got that edge,” Fisher says. “‘I’ve always deserved to be here in the spotlight.’”
Their coach isn’t so different either. He spent nearly 30 years as an assistant and another 13 as head coach at places like the Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Elon University.
“It took me a while, right?” Cignetti says. “I had to take the path less traveled to get to where I am. A little something to prove.”
It’s a path that Saban originally discouraged him from taking. After Alabama’s 2010 football season, Cignetti was a finalist to be the head coach at Kent State, Saban’s alma mater. The school instead hired Darrell Hazell.
Distraught and with a burning desire to be a head coach, Cignetti accepted the job at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where his father won 14 conference or division titles in 20 years as coach, a stint that ended in 2005.
Saban warned Cignetti, “You can get lost down there.”
He went anyway.
“I woke up many mornings like, ‘What did I do?’” Cignetti now chuckles. “But we got things rolling.”
Six years and 53 wins later, Elon, an FCS school in North Carolina, hired him. He led the Phoenix to their first consecutive playoff trips, including a stunning win at James Madison, which in turn hired Cignetti as coach.
At JMU, he presided over the program during its transition into FBS, winning a division or conference title each of his five seasons and leading the Dukes to an 11-1 mark in 2023.
Saban’s biggest concern — “you kind of get stuck” at the lower levels — never panned out. Not with Cignetti.
“He was willing to spend almost 20 years in non-high-profile programs and had success at every one of them,” Saban says. “It’s pretty phenomenal. It’s harder to have success at those places. You don’t always have the resources. A lot of people aren’t willing to do that. They’re going to go some place where they know they can be successful. He was willing to take the risk and it paid off.”
Quite literally. Now, so many years later, here he is. The $8 Million Dollar Man, leading a basketball school into a top-five showdown against one of the country’s biggest football brands.
The talent disparity between the two programs is striking — a team full of four- and five-star talent with a roster worth upwards of $20 million versus a team of… G5 All-Stars.
It’s a true David vs. Goliath.
Upstart program vs. perennial power.
Little brother against big.
IU has lost 28 straight games to Ohio State and has won just 12 of their 98 meetings. The Buckeyes have twice the number of all-time wins as Indiana, 39 conference titles to two, have produced four times the number of NFL Draft picks and have played in 42 more bowl games.
They are 11-point favorites playing in front of a rocking home crowd while ranked No. 2 in the country.
Can that former feisty scout team quarterback take down the Buckeyes?
“Look,” Cignetti said this week, “we’ve got a group of guys and coaches that have won 24 out of their last 25 games, so we don’t have a confidence problem. I look at maybe one time at Elon we had a really good football team. We were 4-1, had lost to an FBS team and went to JMU. They had won about 25 in a row at home.
“Somehow, we’re 38-point underdogs — I have no idea how — and we walked out of there with a win. It’s a football game.”