MIAMI, Fla. (WDRB) – You can have your five-star factories, your recruiting czars with laminated hashtags, your headsets piped into power rating podcasts. College football crowned a champion Monday night, and his name is Curt Cignetti, a man who once waxed staff tables at Indiana of Pennsylvania and now owns a perfect season at Indiana of Indiana.
Yes, that Indiana.
The one where basketballs bounce and bowl bids usually expire with the leaves.
Life is forever changed. This is 16-0. This is the national championship.
“I think that’s called a paradigm shift,” Cignetti said Tuesday morning. “People can cling to an old way of thinking — categorizing teams as this or that, conferences as this or that — or they can adjust to the new world. The shift in the power of college football is happening now.”
And Cignetti, 64 going on 39, is at the vanguard of the new world. He has done it without flair, and certainly with enhanced financial backing, but still not the biggest. The Miami team that Indiana beat 27-21 in the championship game has flashed as much money as anyone in the transfer portal.
“Our NIL is nowhere near what people think it is,” he said, with the satisfaction of a man who just won the Indianapolis 500 in a John Deere.
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He did it with people. He did it with a plan. And he did it so emphatically that there’s little to do but acknowledge him for what he is: One of the great coaches of his time. Maybe the greatest.
His Indiana team never trailed in three playoff games. It only failed to score in all four quarters of a game four times this season.
To get a notion of how difficult this feat was, consider this: Indiana is the first new program to win a national championship since Florida in 1996.
“I knew in third grade I wanted to coach. I’ve told that story many a time. I wanted to be like a Bear Bryant kind of coach,” Cignetti said. “But when I was waxing staff tables at IUP when school was shut down for the playoffs, I never really thought this was possible. I just kept working and things happened, and here we are.”
This is no easy club to break into. Cignetti becomes just the fourth active coach with a national title: Ryan Day at Ohio State, Kirby Smart at Georgia, Dabo Swinney at Clemson — and now, Curt Cignetti at Indiana.
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Indiana fans before the Hoosiers' national championship game against Miami.
He did it not with five-star recruits. His defensive player of the game in Monday’s win, Mikail Kamara, started his college career in the Football Championship Subdivision. Kamara got a crucial blocked punt in the third quarter when Indiana didn’t even have a block punt call. Just rushed his lane, got his hand up, and made history — the first blocked punt in a College Football Playoff game.
“He and I started this journey in FCS,” Kamara said. “Me and him definitely butted heads a lot when I was younger, and just knowing how much I've grown, how much we've grown, I've just known everything that he did was out of love. Even though in the moment I didn't feel it, but now I understand as I get older all the lessons he taught me. To stay humble. To stay poised. To stay ready. It's paying off, and I want to be able to take everything he's taught me into the NFL.”
That development is what it’s about. That career arc. The arc that led Cignetti to jump off of Nick Saban’s staff at Alabama and get out on his own. He was staring at age 50 and didn’t want to be a career assistant. He’d seen that life. So he took a step back, and bet on himself. It’s something he encourages his players to do now.
And now we’re at the crux of what Cignetti has done. In a time when college football — and college sports, period — are changing so dramatically, he has demonstrated in this remarkable 27-2 run at Indiana that teams can still win. There are many collections of individuals out there. But teams are different.
“I think we sent a message, first of all, to society that if you keep your nose to the grindstone and work hard and you've got the right people, anything's possible,” he said. “Are there eight first-round draft choices on this team? Probably not, no, there aren't. But this team — the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.”
And he wasn’t done. Late in the press conference, Cignetti offered his own epilogue — and maybe a warning to the rest of the sport.
“This was chapter two in the book,” he said. “It was a very close, special team. But our first (Indiana) team — they never got the national credit they deserved, because of the controversy with the Playoff and the way we played the last two and a half quarters against Ohio State and Notre Dame. That team got it started. They never trailed until the ninth game of the year. And even then, they went down 10-0 at Michigan State, and then scored 47 straight. That team didn’t get its due. But it was special.”
The storybook ending will be one for the history books for ages.
So what now?
Cignetti said he’ll take a short trip to Houston for the Bear Bryant Award. Then it’s back to the office. The portal. The film. The process. He’s a film junkie, after all. He’s already thinking about cutups that could help next year’s team grow.
But everything changes now. The expectations. The scrutiny. The standard.
“From a schedule and record standpoint,” Cignetti said, “I guess (16-0) would be the absolute definition of perfection. And perfection is impossible to attain on a consistent basis.”
Still, he knows the bar has been moved.
“We’ll continue to take it one day at a time,” he said. “One meeting at a time, one practice at a time... and see where it takes us.”
But for the first time in its long football history, Indiana’s ceiling is not theoretical. It’s tangible. It has a trophy. It has confetti. And it has belief baked into every corner of the program.
"A lot of the senior leaders when I got to this program, when I first stepped in the locker room, you could tell that they believed, and if you didn't believe, you were kind of, like, outcasted. So in a way it was either our way or the highway."
“A sleeping giant,” said Kamara.
“A paradigm shift,” said Cignetti.
Now, everyone else in college football has to adjust.
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