The first-year Hoosiers coach stacked his roster and staff from the Group of 5 ranks in building an early-season juggernaut who he pronounced would play in the Big Ten title game.
Sitting in his spacious but sparsely decorated office overlooking Memorial Stadium on Thursday, armed with the validating hindsight of a 5–0 start, Curt Cignetti explains what the hell he was thinking on Dec. 1, 2023. That was his first day on the job as football coach of the Indiana Hoosiers, and Cignetti was the mouse that roared at the rest of the Big Ten Conference.
Beware the guy who is past the age of rhetorical tiptoeing. Especially an old ball coach who had forgotten what losing even felt like—Cignetti was 52–9 at James Madison, 14–9 in a fixer-upper job at Elon, and 53–17 at Division II IU Pennsylvania. Before that, he was on Nick Saban’s staff at Alabama, so his streak of winning seasons stands at 17. He was just now getting his shot at a big-time job, years late, and a guy like that may just put everyone on blast upon arrival.
It’s a bit of a foreign concept for a program that has lived virtually its entire existence with limited success and limited hope. Indiana has had blips of success among epochs of struggle. A coach who didn’t get a power-conference head job until nearly retirement age is doing this with: a Canadian quarterback from the Mid-American Conference; a defense and skill-position units largely imported from Group of 5 conference programs; an offensive line of holdover Hoosiers that has avoided injury and held up beyond expectations.
“I’ve always had a little on my shoulder,” Cignetti says. “And all those G5 guys—the JMU guys,This team should have a chip on the shoulder, right?” Rourke went into the portal just a few days after Cignetti took the job at Indiana. Cignetti loved what he saw of Rourke on film. It is a testament to the powerhouse Cignetti built in Harrisonburg, Va., that the Dukes of Hoosierville have performed so well and those who stayed behind have excelled at the same time. James Madison is 4–0 this season under new coach Bob Chesney.
“There was a lot of glimpses that was like, if we can tighten this up, we’re going to be great,” he says. “And that became more frequent through the summer and then into camp, and so we had a lot of confidence and chemistry moving forward. So we were just ready to hit the season running.” “He called the moving vans and told them not to come,” Curt says. “They said, ‘Too late, buddy.’ They were on their way.”
The Mountaineers went 5–6 and Frank was fired, but he got his health back. Curt kept playing at WVU, then got into the coaching profession at rival Pitt—the first of a seven-stop odyssey in the assistant ranks. Meanwhile, Frank was hired at Division II IU Pennsylvania and started a dynasty of his own, going 180–52–1 across 20 years and never having a losing season. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.
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