Sorry no link for this but was in the Indy Star
After spending the Sunday
he fired Tom Allen informing players, sitting with team leaders and fielding phone calls, Indiana's athletic director sat for a Zoom the next morning with the head coach at James Madison.
Curt Cignetti had been running his own programs for 13 years — his process so refined he could more or less write it up as a manual — and for 13 years, all he’d done was win.
Dolson was trying to turn around a frustrated loser, a program that had fought for relevance over the latter half of the 2010s only to watch it dry up in an NIL-driven, post-COVID world. The heady days of Michael Penix’s stretch for the pylon against Penn State seemed like a time long past when Dolson sat down in front of his computer and started talking to Cignetti.
As soon as the call ended, Dolson, reenergized, hopped out of his chair and down the hall to Deputy AD Mattie White’s office.
“This guy’s different,” Dolson told White. “I think he can win here.”
So far, Cignetti has done nothing else.
On Saturday, for the first time since 1993, (Indiana’s) Memorial Stadium will host a ranked matchup of Big Ten teams in front of fans, when
No. 18 IU faces No. 25 Nebraska. Discounting the closed-door COVID season, the last time the
Hoosierstook the field at home in conference play in such a game, Bill Mallory was coaching against George Perles.
Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff will be live from outside the South End Zone on Saturday morning. A national audience will be treated to what might turn out to be among the more important games in the Big Ten this season. And between now and then, everyone not living on the inside of Cignetti’s remarkable turnaround thus far will seek an answer to some version of the root question:
How has this all happened?
Veteran savvy
Cignetti generally starts his own answers to variations on that question with his players. But the roster itself reflects decisions he made early in his tenure — ones based on years of head-coaching experience — now integral to Indiana’s success.
Chiefly among them, Cignetti leaned hard into veterans.
He faced massive roster churn in his first days on the job (he’s fond of citing 10 offensive starters and half a defense in the portal as his starting point), and instead of loading up on malleable youth, he and his staff targeted old hands.
“I’m into production over potential,” Cignetti told reporters in December, just before he set about cashing that particular check with a slew of Group-of-Five transfers meant to rebuild key position groups, particularly on offense.
That meant sacrificing long-term stability for short-term steadiness. IU took transfers with just one year of eligibility remaining (potential medical exceptions aside) at positions including quarterback, wide receiver, running back, offensive line, defensive line and elsewhere. There will be plenty of work for Cignetti and his staff to do again in the transfer portal this winter as a result.
But the turnabout has been on display for all to see — Indiana is a veteran team that plays like it in key moments, be they third downs,
red zone situations or tight games. The poise and composure serving IU so well in the season’s most important moments might have been gained elsewhere, but they were hard won nonetheless.
Secret to IU's 6-0 start?The best red zone offense in the country.
“It just brings a confidence to the team,” Wake Forest transfer wide receiver Ke’Shawn Williams, Indiana’s leader with four receiving touchdowns, said after the win at Northwestern earlier this month. “We have a lot of guys who came in who are older, who came from winning cultures, and understand what it takes to be a good team. And it’s clearly translating.”
Since preseason, Cignetti has grounded a lot of his publicly held belief in his team in these traits.
It wasn’t by accident
when he rebuilt his roster, he rebuilt it this way. Maybe, then, it shouldn’t have been surprising to see him so confident in the group he and his staff used significantly bolstered NIL resources to pull together last winter.
Statistically speaking, IU’s leading passer, its four leading rushers, five of its six leading receivers, its top four tacklers and all four players with at least 1.5 sacks so far this season are transfers. Kurtis Rourke (Ohio), Elijah Sarratt (James Madison), Mikail Kamara (James Madison) and Aiden Fisher (James Madison) all currently rank top-five or better in the Big Ten in, respectively, passing yards and touchdowns, receiving yards, sacks and tackles for loss, and total tackles.
Even before a ball was snapped, thrown or kicked this season, Cignetti anchored his confidence in his team in the qualities on display now — and the Hoosiers have made him look prescient.
“We have a lot of veteran players. We have a veteran quarterback. And I think we have a chance to be a good offense and defense and special teams,” Cignetti said in a news conference building up to the Week 1 opener against Florida International. “I feel good about the pieces we have in place.”
The JMU pipeline
It’s difficult not to notice how many of those players added last winter — players now crucial to Indiana’s success — enjoyed the same experience under Cignetti at his last stop.
Fully 13 players followed Cignetti and the six assistants he brought with him from James Madison to Bloomington. That includes starters at seven positions, eight if you count Solomon Vanhorse’s role as kickoff return specialist. And that’s not accounting for the likelihood Nick Kidwell would have started at one of Indiana’s two offensive guard spots if not for
a season-ending injury suffered in fall camp.
Those players have talked since the beginning of the offseason about the responsibility they feel for leading, even as new faces. On both sides of the ball, JMU transfers have prioritized reinforcing their coaches’ messages and methods, and vouched for the results, then turned plenty in themselves.
And when Indiana has needed to set a tone — when the program has needed confidence, or cool heads, or anything else — former
Dukes haven’t been shy of those moments either.
“This is not the goal,” Kamara said after the Northwestern win clinched bowl eligibility two weeks ago. “This is fantastic, but this is not the end.”
When, at Big Ten media days in July, Cignetti referenced “a lot of guys that have played winning football, that have good career production numbers,” he might have been thinking foremost about the talent he brought with him from Harrisonburg.
“They believe that they’re going to win,” Cignetti said, referencing the several JMU transfers Indiana announced during the December signing window. “They think like champions. They believe in the coaches. They believe in the program. They believe they’re going to step foot on (campus) and make a difference.
“Guess what? I believe that too.”
The biggest key, according to virtually everyone involved, has been Cignetti himself.
Beginning on that November Zoom call with Dolson, momentum has built steadily behind the man who’s never really known losing as a head coach.
For a long time — until the games started — Cignetti presented a great academic exercise for the Big Ten. Here was a coach of unflappable confidence, a man who boiled his recruiting pitch down to “I win. Google me,” who had success everywhere he went, pushing up against the myriad challenges presented by trying to turn around
the losingest program in the conference’s long history.
The unstoppable force has, so far, moved the unmovable object. The coach who estimates the average day starts before sun up and ends after sun down, who has a projector aimed at an empty white wall in his office he uses to watch film in virtually all his spare time, has been the impetus behind building one of
the most competent, efficient and ruthless teams anyone around IU football can remember in years.
Whenever they’re asked to explain how, virtually everyone involved starts with Cignetti himself.
“It starts with his confidence,” Fisher said. “He instills that into his players, just the way he holds himself, the way he prepares, and you really see it trickle down into his players going into each game. We know we’re more prepared than the other team is, and we just kind of ride that into the game.”
For so much of the past 10 months, Curt Cignetti has been explaining himself.
How he recruits. How he plays offense and defense. How he attacks the portal. How he builds a winner. How he plans to turn around the once-moribund IU football program he suddenly has flying high.
In any number of ways, Cignetti has been asked to detail in detail the process he’s used to take Indiana — a winner just nine times in the past three years — to 6-0 in his first season in Bloomington. Which made a question Cignetti got in his weekly Monday news conference all the more fascinating:
Over these past several months, what have you learned?
“What I've learned up to this point,” Cignetti said, after a brief pause for reflection, “is that we have unlimited potential as an institution and football program. 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.”
Since his first day on the job, Cignetti has given his fans permission to dream. Thus far, those dreams have turned steadily into reality, and IU’s coach shows no intention of capping his ambitions now.
