By Cort Street | @cort_street
Sports Capital Journalism Program
ATLANTA – As Curt Cignetti took the podium to give his opening remarks as the honoree at the Eddie Robinson Coach of the Year Award presentation, he paused, taking a moment to think reflectively at the side of the bust of Robinson, a coach he had idolized for so long. And, in that moment, a new side of Cignetti emerged; not the blunt, often sarcastic personality that had become synonymous with the Indiana University head coach, but one that was filled with thankfulness and humility.
“I never thought an event like this was possible in 2011 when I left the University of Alabama as an assistant football coach and took a Division II head coaching job,” Cignetti said. “I never really aspired to get the next job or the next job. I just worked my job every day and tried to make us the best we could be and strived to improve every single day.”
The presentation took place two days before the College Football Playoff National Championship, as the Football Writers Association of America acknowledged the accomplishments of the Indiana head coach’s sensational year at the helm of his program.
“I’m humbled, honored, and grateful for this prestigious award and to be selected by the sports writers of America, the Allstate Sugar Bowl, and the Robinson family,” Cignetti said to the group that had gathered to bestow the award upon him.
Cignetti made waves throughout college football in 2024, taking over an Indiana team that was coming off a 3-9 campaign in 2023 and leading a program with a 137-year history of football to a school-record 11-win season in his first year the helm. This year’s team, which finished with two losses – notably, to Notre Dame and Ohio State, who will play for the national championship here Monday night – made an appearance in the College Football Playoff, marking the 2024 team as the Hoosiers’ most prominent since John Pont’s 1967 Indiana squad appeared in the Rose Bowl against the University of Southern California Trojans.
In Cignetti’s prolific 14-year coaching career, during which he has garnered a 100-36 record, he has never had a losing season. And thanks to his successful 2023 team at James Madison, he became the first coach to start 10-0 at separate programs in consecutive seasons.
It was Cignetti’s love for the history of college football that stood out from the beginning of his heartfelt remarks, when he provided a pointed ode to the legacy of the Eddie Robinson whose name the Coach of the Year Award will forever commemorate.
“I can remember waking up on Sunday mornings, and you had the Ara Parseghian Notre Dame football show, and you had the Grambling football Eddie Robinson show,” Cignetti said. “So I grew up watching Grambling football every Sunday. [Robinson was] one of the greatest football coaches ever, over 200 players in the NFL, Canadian League, AFL, and the thousands upon thousands of lives that he influenced positively through his leadership and mentorship, a true icon in the sport of football in the state of Louisiana and the entire country.”
Eddie Robinson III, who attends the Coach of the Year award ceremony yearly in honor of his grandfather, compared Cignetti with his prestigious relative in a memorable tribute through the intriguing mention of an unlikely object – a recliner.
“For those of you who don’t know, Coach Cignetti has a 35-year old recliner, a faded teal, Bradington Young recliner, per his wife, Miss Manette,” Robinson III said. “While settled into this recliner, Coach Cignetti watches football, film, sometimes eats dinner, and on occasions, accidentally falls asleep in the chair.
“Coach and Miss Manette,” he went on, “my grandfather had a reddish Lazy Boy recliner where he did all the things above mentioned that you did in yours. It’s where he concocted his brilliance, as well as you also, Coach.”
For Cignetti to be compared with the football mind of a coach that he had idolized for so long was a powerful moment that so perfectly contextualized the true magnitude of what the Indiana coach had accomplished.
The Hoosiers first asserted themselves on the fringe of national attention with a 42-13 win over UCLA in their third game of the season. But it was a 56-7 victory over a capable Nebraska team in Week 8 that fully placed Indiana in the spotlight of college football. Then, with the eyes of the country on Bloomington, the Hoosiers earned their signature win of the season with just their second victory over Michigan since 1988 in a physical 20-15 battle that moved Indiana to 10-0 on the season.
Cignetti spoke to the culture he instilled that resulted in such immediate success for a program that had fallen into mediocrity for so long.
“First thing you gotta do is change the way people think,” Cignetti said. “You gotta have high standards, expectations, a blueprint and a plan, and you gotta work it daily. …You gotta get everybody thinking alike on one thing, eye on the bullseye, not all the other stuff, eliminate the noise and the clutter. So it’s a day-to-day process, and then once you start winning, belief and confidence, it just sort of snowballs.”
The challenge for Cignetti going forward, of course, will be finding a way to sustain the program’s newfound success. Asked whether he felt the pressure of trying to build upon this year’s record-setting team, Cignetti did not hesitate in his response.
“The most pressure that me or anybody on my staff will feel is the pressure we put on ourselves,” he said. “And we all expect a lot of ourselves. We have high standards and expectations. It’s no different than any other season, to be quite honest.”
Cignetti’s season did not just reinvent the meaning of success for the Indiana football program. More pertinently, Cignetti redefined the rebuilding process across the landscape of college football. After witnessing Indiana’s rise from a 3-9 season in 2023 to an 11-2 mark in 2024, the fourth-best improvement by a first-year head coach since at least 1996, there will be more pressure than ever on coaches around the nation to find ways to achieve immediate success in this new era of the sport.
Cignetti credited the transfer portal – through which the Hoosiers took in 13 transfers from James Madison – for his ability to create such a sudden shift in the program’s trajectory. But he also pointed out his previous record of immediate success as a statement of his abilities that sets him apart from other college coaches.
“I think with the advent of the portal, sort of a free agency, turnarounds can happen quicker,” he said. “Of course, I did [a turnaround] at Elon, they were [2-9], and I started 8-1 my first year there. So even with the portal, you still have to know what you’re doing and get the right people.”
Cignetti’s message was clear – it is his prolific history that has given him the confidence to adapt in this chaotic modern landscape of college football, and it is that confidence that will continue to inspire a transformation in Bloomington for as long as he is there.
