Indiana’s Curt Cignetti is Sporting News College Football Coach of the Year | Sporting News

He wore a gray suit and open white shirt, pacing to every corner of the white map of Indiana that forms the foundation of the basketball team’s logo at center court of Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall. As he zipped from Gary to Evansville to Elkhart and Indianapolis, he held a microphone in his right hand but seemed not to need it. He preached, loudly, to an audience of Hoosiers fans who believed in their university and athletic program but had little reason to extend that faith to the football team.

They hadn’t met Curt Cignetti, though.

That night, during a timeout interrupting IU’s Big Ten basketball game against Maryland, they did.

“Hey, look, I’m super fired-up about this opportunity,” he said, his Yinzer accent leaking onto nearly every word. “I’ve never taken a backseat to anybody – and don’t plan on starting now.

“Purdue sucks. But so does Michigan and Ohio State!”

That was it, 30 words arithmetically but still a soliloquy any committed Hoosier might compare to Shakespeare’s finest work. Who knows how many of them walked out of the arena 90 minutes later believing Indiana football was about to be transformed into a Big Ten contender? But all of them had to recognize IU football was going to be different.

New Indiana football coach Curt Cignetti: “Purdue sucks … but so does Michigan and Ohio State. #iufb pic.twitter.com/Lh2Cvzu117

— Jeff Rabjohns (@JeffRabjohns) December 2, 2023

This different, though? Like, Indiana competing for the national championship? Who could have imagined that? Indiana entered the season with the lowest historic winning percentage of any program in a power conference. The Hoosiers had recorded three winning seasons in this century and were 78 games under .500 since the 2000 season. In Big Ten competition, their winning percentage was .251. They won fewer than two league games 10 times.

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Sporting News Coach of the Year: Curt Cignetti

If somebody walks in and slaps an 11-1 record on top of that perpetual tragedy, just like that, of course he is going to be selected as The Sporting News College Football Coach of the Year. It hasn’t hurt that he won all these games in a season where that led not to some random bowl game, but instead to Notre Dame Stadium for a first-round game against the Fighting Irish in the expanded, 12-team College Football Playoff. Cignetti made Indiana matter when, at last, mattering mattered.

Cignetti’s instant invigoration of Indiana football started with 31 transfers he attracted to IU in advance of the 2024 football season, including 13 who’d played for him on an 11-2 team last season at James Madison. The new and old Hoosiers he led this autumn elevated his career record to 130-36.

That is an amazing winning percentage, .783, but 166 games is not a lot for a coach who turned 63 years old in June. Clemson’s Dabo Swinney is only 55 and already has coached 226. Contained in Cignetti’s numbers, though, is the story of a football lifer who worked years for his big break and finally decided to make one for himself.

“I win. Google me.”

What has become the most famous of Cignetti’s many celebrated quotes developed from his introduction as Indiana coach in December 2023, when he was asked by a reporter how he sells the “vision of your culture.”

It wasn’t an unreasonable question. Cignetti was a relatively new name to the coaching carousel, even if he’d been in the business four decades, even if his last name was well established among those who know their college football history. It was important to those introducing him to the Indiana public to explain what made him successful at his three prior stops as a head coach

Cignetti acknowledges he was a bit weary by that point, not so much because of his ability being doubted but the pervading sense Nick Saban and Urban Meyer working in tandem couldn’t make a winner out of IU. That’s not what he was asked, but it’s pretty much what he heard.

Thank goodness for that, right?

“I love it. It fires us up,” center Mike Katic told The Sporting News. “It shows that our leader and our coach has this much confidence and everything. It just rubs off on the players, and we carry that same amount of confidence and swagger. So we love it.

“Some of it’s like – whoa! Even we, it kind of opens our eyes a little bit.”

Imagine what we all would have lost as sports fans had Cignetti not “bet on himself”, in his words, by taking the head coaching job at another Indiana – Indiana University of Pennsylvania, or IUP as it’s known by those who know it – and taking a huge paycut to leave a prestigious position on Saban’s Alabama staff.

It’s not just all the games “Coach Cig” won at IUP, Elon, James Madison and, now, Indiana. It’s an almost singular gift for making bold declarations that are instantly viral and (mostly) issued without affront.

In 2024, with far fewer newspapers but far more media outlets covering college programs regularly, the primary vessel of public communication for head coaches has become the weekly press conference. It can be perfunctory, at times, the coach struggling not to give away strategic secrets and reporters searching for something, anything, worthy of an article, a broadcast report, even a tweet.

Cignetti makes each week’s presser nearly as compelling as IU games, although that’s hard to do with all the Hoosiers accomplished in 2024: with an 8-1 mark, they set a school record for Big Ten conference wins; with a 66-0 victory over rival Purdue, they recorded their largest margin against an FBS opponent; they built a 10-game winning streak that was the longest in program history; they finished with regular season with an 11-1 overall record that marked the first double-digit win season ever at Indiana.

“He’s just a football guy. You can tell that just by shaking his hand,” All-American linebacker Aiden Fisher, who followed Cignetti from James Madison, told TSN. “He talks about his family, and his dad and how he inspired him. I think coming from a football family really means a lot to him.

“Everything is always about winning football games, being the best player or person you could be. To me, that’s something I didn’t want to get away from.”

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“We don’t have a confidence problem.”

Cignetti’s belief in himself and his programs goes back to his family background in the sport, through his time working for such football men as Pitt’s Foge Fazio and Johnny Majors, NC State’s Chuck Amato and Saban, whom he served for four seasons as wide receivers coach and recruiting coordinator.

Alabama staff members were paid well, and the salaries for assistants at the highest level of the sport were on the verge of explosion. Cignetti was about to turn 50, though, after the Tide finished the 2010 season with a 10-3 record and bowl victory. He was presented the opportunity to become the head coach at IUP, a Division II program where his father became a College Football Hall of Famer with 182 wins, 13 playoff appearances and two trips to the NCAA Championship game.

Accepting that job meant a significant paycut, with no sure path back to the sport’s highest level. There is not an overabundance of former D2 coaches running D1 programs.

“I made an unconventional move when I went to IUP. It wasn’t the same place as when my dad had it rolling there,” Cignetti told TSN. “You had about 25 percent of the budget, coming off the previous two years at 4-10 in the conference. I woke up many mornings early on thinking: What did I do?

“But my wife’s family was from Indiana, and my parents were still there, and we had six good years there. But I didn’t take the job at IUP – the goal wasn’t to go prove yourself and move up the ladder. It was: I was changing lanes. I gave up a lot of things to follow my dream. I don’t know that you’ve ever seen a move like that – not in recent history.”

It did not take Cignetti long – really, just a matter of months – to refashion IUP into a winner. So what’s happening with the Hoosiers now is almost habitual for Coach Cig. The Crimson Hawks went 7-3 his first season, then won the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference West division and reached the NCAA quarterfinals in his second and finished with a .757 winning percentage where his father built a superpower. That facilitated his climb to the Division I FCS level, where he quickly boosted Elon and then James Madison, where he was 52-9 in five years, with each of those teams winning a conference or division championship in the Colonial or Sun Belt.

“Curt wanted to be a head coach,” his brother, Frank Cignetti Jr., told TSN. An assistant coach at such programs as Cal, North Carolina, Boston College and Pitt, as well as a half-dozen NFL teams, Frank Jr. played at IUP and worked as an assistant coach under his father for nine seasons in the 90s. “The IUP community, man, we were all very excited because we believed Curt would get it back to a championship level.

“In my opinion, what he has done (at Indiana) is the best job in the history of college football. I know it’s a new era with NIL and portal, but what he has done in terms of bringing players in, evaluating good football players, developing, getting his culture put in place – I don’t know if anyone’s ever done it better.”

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“We’re the emerging superpower in college football. Why would I leave?”

As Cignetti delivered this astonishing season to Indiana, it was obvious there would be some program, somewhere at the FBS level, that would offer him a significant amount of money to leave. He earned $4.25 million according to USA Today, placing him only 49^th among D1 head coaches. Only four coaches from the SEC and Big Ten ranked behind him.

On November 16, after the Hoosiers had reached 9-0 with a win over Michigan, it was announced he had accepted a new contract from Indiana that will run until 2032 and pay him $8 million annually, with an additional $1 million annual retention bonus.

Interviewed that morning on Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff program, he managed to be droll and audacious at once. Was he kidding or does he really believe that? Well, yes.

Think of where Indiana football was when he started.

“I was used to a standard and winning championships, year-in, year out, and there was sort of this dark cloud around the program on campus,” Cignetti said. “And then outside the university, there were sort of people looking at you like it was a hopeless job. And I wasn’t going to lower my standards or expectations. I wasn’t going to have it. So I made a few public comments that …

“And it is the entertainment business.”

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“Is that a serious question? I’m not even going to answer that; the answer is so obvious.”

Cignetti was maneuvering gracefully through his first post-defeat press conference in 371 days. He gave Ohio State the proper credit. He pointed out his defense had played reasonably well despite the 38-15 final score – given that two of the Buckeyes’ touchdowns were the result of special teams mistakes. He addressed a question about Indiana’s fitness for the College Football Playoff by pointing out, “I don’t make those decisions,” and the Hoosiers still had an important game – a rivalry game against Purdue, for the Old Oaken Bucket – remaining on the schedule.

Toward the end, though, a reporter chose to revisit that discussion.

“Do you think, going into this last week, that you should be one of the 12 teams based on your body of work?”

Well, here they are now, No. 8 in the final CFP committee rankings and seeded No. 10. Indiana will visit Notre Dame for an 8 p.m. game to be televised by both ABC and ESPN.

“It was really the winning culture that he brings. Not only him, but everyone that came with him from JMU, as well,” Katic said. “Just that winning mindset and that confidence, that swagger that everyone has. It really rubbed off on everyone that came from different programs or were here at Indiana last year.

“It’s just the confidence he has in himself and his players. It’s very easy to buy into.”

It was convenient that all of Indiana’s most significant challenges were at home, save for their trip to Ohio State. It is less so that many of those teams crumbled after facing IU. Nebraska came in at 5-1, lost 56-7, then went 1-4 in what remained of the season. Washington played in last season’s CFP Championship game but finished just 6-6, including a 31-17 defeat in Bloomington. That helped lead to many questions about the worth of the Indiana schedule.

The college football establishment – which is to say, fans of established powers and some of the media devoted to covering them – finds less charm in the sort of resurrection Cignetti has conjured than might be apparent in college basketball or the NHL.

“We had a lot of work to do last December. But I’ll tell you: In three weeks, 22 transfers, all 2-3 year starters, good players, good character, I knew in my heart that we had flipped the roster,” Cignetti told TSN. “I mean, I knew. And we needed a lot of new faces. And I was very optimistic about what we could do year one.”