LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – As college football’s signature Saturday morning showcase, ESPN’s GameDay is a big deal no matter what college town it visits. But there was some extra meaning for Bloomington on Saturday, with former Hoosiers coach and longtime GameDay patriarch Lee Corso returning to town, and tributes to the man responsible for the event coming, new IU coach Curt Cignetti.
Corso came back to Bloomington in person and was clearly moved by several of the tributes, none more than a get together at the Uptown Café in Bloomington with many of his former players, with the exchanges caught by GameDay cameras.
An at-times tearful Corso listened as former players and coaches expressed their appreciation around the table.
“He gave everybody a chance,” said Terry Tallen, an Indiana player from 1977 to 1980. “Whether you were a coach that was hired or a player who got a scholarship. It’s love. I mean, we love him and we know that he loves us. He’s always loved us.”
Indiana football hosted College GameDay in Bloomington. (Source: IU Athletics)
Corso told the story of Indiana’s 1979 Holiday Bowl victory, the first bowl win in school history. With 11 seconds left and BYU about to attempt a potential game winning field goal, Corso said he called timeout and had Father James Higgins pray in the huddle.
“I walked over to him and said, ‘Father Higgins it’s you against eight million Mormons,’” Corso said. “Guy lines up, kicks it (Indiana blocks the kick). I said, ‘Thank you, God.’ (Higgins) said, ‘You’re welcome.’ And they carried us both off the field.”
Corso hired the NCAA’s first female football coach at IU, and Elizabeth “Buzz” Kurpius told him, at the get-together, “I appreciate everything you did for me. I’ve had all these friends for all these years.”
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Corso said, “She was legit. Full-time coach, same salary and everything else. . . . You were the right person to break the barrier, because you were terrific.”
Jim Muehling, an IU assistant in 1981 and ’82, said, “I’ll always remember him saying, in life, what you give, you’ll always have, what you hold back is gone forever.”
Bloomington Mayor Kerry Thompson read a proclamation designating it Lee Corso Day in the city, and it certainly was that.
The old coach donned an old IU cap as his signature headgear during the GameDay picks segment, sitting beside former IU baseball star Kyle Schwarber, who broke out an old IU batting helmet for the appearance.
But if the day was a poignant appreciation of Corso, it was no less for Cignetti, the 63-year-old first-year Indiana coach who has taken the town, and the Big Ten Conference, by storm. He remembered his own Corso moment. He was a football player in Morgantown, W.Va., when his father was head coach at West Virginia.
“My dad overcame cancer my senior of high school,” Cignetti said. “He was getting his last rights twice, and Lee (then coach at Indiana) sent a Holy Cross that, in the letter, he said, had special healing powers. And that sat on top of his dresser the whole time from surgery through his recovery, and he beat cancer and lived 43 more years so Coach Corso has always really had a special place in the Cignetti family.”
Nick Saban, the Hall of Fame coach at Alabama and now a member of the College GameDay crew, remembered Cignetti as one of his assistant coaches.
“This guy was always confident,” Saban said. “You know, we're sitting in the staff meeting after the 2009 championship, and the Kent State job’s open. It's not a very good job. Nobody wants it. They call me and ask me, ‘You know, is anybody on your staff interested?’ So, I say in the staff meeting, anybody want the Kent State job? First guy put his hand up -- right there (Cignetti). He's always confident, and I think that confidence is helping him be successful everywhere he's been, because that rubs off on everybody, just like the culture in this place has completely changed because of this guy's attitude.”
Kirk Herbstreit asked Cignetti about the team he inherited and the job he’s been able to do, and Cignetti was fast to point out that it was a quick build. He expressed gratitude that a number of his James Madison players followed him to IU without ever being asked. They gave him the confidence to at one point late in a press conference after he took over, to suggest to reporters, “I win. Google me.”
Indiana football hosted College GameDay in Bloomington. (Source: IU Athletics)
“The team I inherited here is playing somewhere else,” he said. “I mean, my first day on the job, we had 10 offensive starters in the transfer portal, and half our defense. So, you know, you're hiring staff doing a lot of stuff. Three weeks later, we’ve got 22 transfers. They were all two-, three-year starters, right? And I really felt in my heart like we had flipped culture, and that's where the ‘Google me’ comment came from. It was the end of a press conference and had been a long month, and I'd answered that question 15 times. So finally, I decided to simplify, right?”
These days, there’s little need to Google. When you’re 7-0 at Indiana, your reputation goes beyond a search engine. He said he knows the comment has led to certain perception of him.
“He's cocky. He's abrasive, arrogant,” he said in a GameDay feature story. “Hey, look, I did that. I got to own that. I mean, is that who I am? Well, I guess it's part of who I am, because I did it.”
But Cignetti’s fire has lit the IU campus. When he stood up in front of a basketball crowd in Assembly Hall and shouted, “Purdue sucks,” it jolted people.
“I was on campus for about 10 minutes, and I could detect the doom and gloom,” he told ESPN. “You know that night at the basketball game, I felt like I got to wake these people up.”
In a sold-out Memorial Stadium on Saturday – a stadium that now has been sold out for the rest of the season, fans waved Cignetti towels that were printed to resemble a pack of Marlboros. And they basked in the glow of being, improbably, at the center of college football for a day – and maybe a lot more.
“Now I don't endorse smoking, but that's just one of five towels, and we got about 10 different t-shirts,” Cignetti said. “So, look, these people were starving for success, and they got a little taste of it, and want it more and more and more, and this is what it's become. But guess what? We’ve got to do our part.”
On a sun-kissed afternoon in Bloomington, Cignetti has already done more than that.
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