CHICAGO, Ill. (WDRB) — Sixteen and oh.
Say it out loud and it still sounds made up. A year ago, Indiana arrived at Big Ten Media Days as one of college football's best stories: the loud new coach, the overflowing confidence, the impossible promises.
Then they did the impossible.
Sixteen games. Sixteen wins. A Big Ten championship. A national championship.
Now they're back in Chicago, set to meet the media and the questions have changed.
Last summer, Indiana spent media days answering questions about whether it belonged. This summer, it will answer questions about whether it can stay.
The underdog card isn't completely gone, but it is greatly diminished. The Hoosiers were picked to finish third in the Big Ten this week in an annual poll of the league's media. And anytime you share a conference with Michigan and Ohio State, you're never going to be granted top dog status willingly.
What is gone, however, is the surprise factor. It disappeared somewhere around Thanksgiving. Every opponent will spend the next four months measuring itself against the defending national champions. Every fan base will convince itself its team can be the one that finally knocks Indiana off.
Asked about Indiana's championship run in Chicago this week, Purdue coach Barry Odom said, "In the landscape of college football it should give every player, every coach, every fan base hope, vision and belief that it can happen."
Cignetti doesn't seem particularly interested in inspiring anyone.
While everyone else wants to discuss his program's remarkable accomplishment, he talks about practice. While everyone else wants to celebrate 16-0, he talks about Tuesday.
Asked this spring what improving on an undefeated national championship season even looks like, he didn't talk about another trophy.
"That's over," he said. "You can't really improve on 16-0. … What you can improve on is your day-to-day consistency."
For Cignetti, the task awaiting in the coming season isn't building on a national championship. It's tearing down that title and trying to build another one. The first episode of the program's in-house documentary series was titled, "Back to Square One."
Most championship coaches spend the offseason convincing everyone they can do it again. Cignetti spent it pretending last year never happened. Not because he doesn't appreciate it, but because he understands the cost of believing your own hype.
"We're coming off the national championship," he said this spring. "There's a lot of feel-goods out there, and it's really important we have the edge and get better, and our guys have to be humble and hungry."
That is coachspeak, of course. But it's not wrong. Every championship team believes hunger won it the title. Every championship coach knows comfort can lose the next one.
Cignetti keeps steering the conversation back to the ground floor. He talks about rebuilding the house from the ground up. He says this team probably has more work to do than either of his first two Indiana teams, because so many faces are new. He isn't trying to recreate last season. He's trying to recreate the habits that produced it.
That's the real challenge waiting for Indiana this fall. Not defending a championship, but defending the mindset that produced one.
Everybody wants to know whether the Hoosiers can stay on top. For Cignetti, that's the wrong question. His question is whether his players — and program — can keep working like they haven't arrived yet, even though that national championship trophy back in Bloomington says they have.
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