College Football

How the unapologetically brash Curt Cignetti has turned Indiana football into a winner

Updated Oct. 17, 2024 3:37 p.m. ET

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Michael Cohen

College Football and College Basketball Writer

Last December, within a few days of being hired as the new football coach at Indiana, where the Hoosiers had bottomed out with three victories against conference opponents in the preceding three seasons combined, Curt Cignetti was handed a microphone near the center of Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall, the university's famous basketball arena. He wore a gray suit with an open-collared white shirt and brown shoes, and Cignetti's left hand rested coolly in his pants pocket as he began to address the crowd.

"Hey, look," Cignetti said, removing his left hand from his pocket and raising it like a preacher. "I'm super fired up about this opportunity. I've never taken a back seat to anybody and don't plan on starting now."

The fans roared. 

"Purdue sucks!" he yelled. 

The fans roared even louder. 

"The same with Michigan and Ohio State!" Cignetti bellowed, pumping his clenched left fist. "I-U!"

The roof nearly quaked as Cignetti handed the microphone back to an athletic department staffer and walked off the floor to a standing ovation.

Verbal jabs at Big Ten rivals aside, speeches like the one Cignetti gave late last year are far from unusual in college sports, where football coaches are most commonly fired and hired in the immediate aftermath of Thanksgiving, at which point the best way to excite a large number of fans is often with a halftime speech at an on-campus basketball game. A few hours up the road in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the Wolverines were still celebrating their first national championship since 1997, new head coach Sherrone Moore did the same thing after Jim Harbaugh departed for the NFL.

There is, however, one key difference between what Cignetti was trying to accomplish during his appearance in front of the Hoosier faithful and what Moore was aiming to achieve at Michigan — an important discrepancy that underscores the unique challenge of coaching football at Indiana, a school that will always offer more support and admiration for its men's basketball program, which has won five national championships and nearly two dozen conference titles. Cignetti, 63, is the latest in a long line of coaches who believed that they could finally right the ship at Indiana by successfully fusing the basketball faction of the fan base with a much smaller football constituency. The last six coaches in his position all tried and failed as the Hoosiers averaged 4.2 wins per season from 1997-2023. But the unapologetically brash Cignetti, whom IU hired from James Madison, has become the only head coach in school history to win his first six games, and it's just the second time Indiana football has ever begun a season 6-0. The Hoosiers are one of the best stories in college football this season and carry a No. 16 ranking into Saturday's high-profile matchup with Nebraska (noon ET on FOX and the FOX Sports App).

"I think what I've learned up to this point is that we have unlimited potential as an institution and football program," Cignetti said in a news conference earlier this week. "That if you commit daily and do the things you need to do to be successful, there's no imposed limitations on what you can achieve."

It's the same kind of grandiose remark that Cignetti has been making since athletic director Scott Dolson plucked him from James Madison, where he compiled an overall record of 52-9 in five seasons while ushering the Dukes through a near-seamless transition from FCS to FBS. Prior to that, Cignetti averaged 8.8 wins per season at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, a Division II school, and then reinvigorated an Elon program that hadn't finished above .500 in six years, guiding the Phoenix to the FCS playoffs in back-to-back campaigns. 

When asked how he planned to overhaul the culture at Indiana amid significant roster turnover, Cignetti responded with a one-liner that immediately went viral: "It's pretty simple: I win," Cignetti said. "Google me." And at Big Ten Media Days, where the Hoosiers were picked to finish 17th out of 18 teams in this year's preseason poll, Cignetti rattled off statistics about the last two times his teams were projected to finish second-to-last in a given season and wildly exceeded expectations. "Now, I'm not into making predictions," he said at Lucas Oil Stadium in late July. "That's just a historical fact. I know you guys have been waiting for me to say something crazy. That wasn't quite crazy."

What has been "crazy," at least by IU football standards, is the degree to which Cignetti's group continues to pummel teams in the early part of the season. Indiana decimated its first six opponents by a combined score of 285-89, including three consecutive blowouts of conference foes UCLA (42-13), Maryland (42-28) and Northwestern (41-24). The Hoosiers rank fourth nationally in total offense (515.7 yards per game) and second in the country in scoring offense (47.5 points per game), and they're one of only two teams that has yet to trail in a game this season, with Army being the other. IU's mark of six straight wins by double digits broke a school record that had been in place since the 1905-06 campaigns. 

All of which was enabled by shrewd roster management from Cignetti and his staff, who flooded the roster with talented players from the transfer portal, many of whom came from James Madison. So far, the Hoosiers' leading passer (quarterback Kurtis Rourke), leading rusher (tailback Justice Ellison), leading receiver (wideout Elijah Sarratt) and leading tackler (linebacker Aiden Fisher) were all at different schools last season. 

"Huge credit to Coach Cignetti and the job he's done," said Matt Canada, who attended Indiana and eventually worked as the Hoosiers' quarterbacks coach (2004) and offensive coordinator (2007-10) before later transitioning to the NFL, where he most recently served as the offensive coordinator for the Pittsburgh Steelers. "As an alum watching, they've come in and had great confidence. He laid his plan out from the day he got hired, and [it's been] just an unbelievable job so far. It's really fun to watch, and I'm sure [it's] enjoyable for the players and the coaches, enjoyable for a lot of the IU alums who've been following it for a long time."

Canada certainly qualifies as someone who has followed the program for a long time. A native of New Palestine, Indiana, which is roughly an hour northeast of Bloomington, he was a lifelong Hoosier fan who grew up loving IU basketball more than IU football, though that eventually changed as his own career progressed. And when Canada first worked at Indiana as a graduate assistant under the late Bill Mallory, who remains the winningest coach in school history with a career record of 69-77-3, he remembers one of the biggest challenges was getting students to actually enter the stadium after they'd been tailgating during the morning and afternoon. This week's game against Nebraska will be the program's first sellout since Oct. 23, 2021, when Indiana hosted No. 5 Ohio State, and that's in large part because of verbal challenges Cignetti has issued to fans. 

The financial constraints for Indiana's football program have lessened as well during an era of inflated television contracts and stratospheric revenue for the Big Ten. Former head coach Gerry DiNardo, who coached the Hoosiers from 2002-04, recalled situations where the athletic department routinely funneled money to the men's basketball program because that was the school's most popular sport, emblematic of "the culture," as he described it. But DiNardo pointed to the lack of a "buy game" on Indiana's non-conference football schedule — meaning the Hoosiers didn't face a high-level Power 4 opponent in exchange for financial compensation — as a sign that the finances have stabilized amid a new broadcast deal that will eventually net each Big Ten school close to $100 million per year. 

That is why both Canada and DiNardo believe that Cignetti is the right coach at the right time for Indiana football, the one who might finally be able to turn the tide. 

"It's like a perfect storm," DiNardo said. "Everything seems so good. How long-lasting is it? I think the answer to how substantial this can be as we go forward, I think that's Cignetti. He's proven he can do this, not just for one or two years, but he has done it at all these programs for an extended period of time. 

"Is it sustainable? I believe it is."

Michael Cohen covers college football and basketball for FOX Sports with an emphasis on the Big Ten. Follow him at @Michael_Cohen13.

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