Everyone wants to know how Curt Cignetti’s Indiana has done it.
One of the hardest things about building a college football program is not just achieving success, but sustaining and improving upon it. Yet for Indiana, eleven wins in 2024 and a College Football Playoff berth turned into a 13-0 record and a No. 1 seed in 2025.
The Hoosiers were played off the field by Notre Dame and Ohio State last season, then beat Oregon on the road by two scores and defeated the Buckeyes en route to a Big Ten championship this year. It may look like only two more wins, but in college football, the gulf between great and elite can be depressingly wide (ask Penn State).
Indiana’s success is boring by design and, like all teams, a reflection of its head coach. It’s deliberate. It’s competent. The Hoosiers block, tackle and execute. They are vegetables in a society obsessed with the fast-food version of success. It would be easier to pinpoint the “why” if there were something flashy about it, but Cignetti’s approach — and his prowess as a scout and developer of talent — simply wins (Google it), to the tune of a 24-2 record in two seasons for a program that entered 2025 as the losingest in FBS history.
Indiana finds talent — however unheralded it may be — evaluates it, develops it and deploys it. There is no wunderkind young coordinator with a gimmick scheme on either side of the ball. There aren’t five-star prospects across the roster. True, Indiana has the Heisman Trophy winner in Fernando Mendoza, but he is not a transcendent athletic freak like Cam Newton. Mendoza was a former two-star recruit who produced on a bad Cal team before coming to IU through the transfer portal.
When Indiana athletic director Scott Dolson set out to replace Tom Allen in December 2023, he established criteria based on what had worked at comparable programs such as North Carolina, Duke and others in the Big Ten. From there, the department built a candidate profile, and one of the required boxes was experience as a recruiting coordinator.
Cignetti fit it. He held that role for six years at NC State under Chuck Amato and spent four years as a recruiting coordinator on Nick Saban’s original Alabama staff. That emphasis ran counter to what was en vogue in college football, as many power-conference programs chased an NFL-style model with an empowered front office and a coach less involved in roster construction.
Cignetti comes from a coaching family. He grew up around the West Virginia program while his father, Frank Sr., coached there in the 1970s. Frank Sr. later led Indiana University of Pennsylvania to perennial Division II contender status from 1986-2005.
Cignetti’s brother, Frank Jr., has been a journeyman assistant coach with multiple stops in college football and the NFL. Curt remembers going to Mountaineer Field and watching his father and then-WVU coach Bobby Bowden study the game on 16-millimeter film.
“Whether you’re an offensive lineman, a defensive lineman, a skill player on either side of the ball, even quarterbacks, you have to have a certain amount of movement skills to be successful on the football field,” Frank Jr. said. “So it all starts from the ground up: ankle flexion, the knee bend, the hips, the ability to bend from the hips. And this, you know, has been in football forever. I can remember being a young coach, my father talking about those three traits when you watch film.”
That perspective speaks to how Curt Cignetti views the game. The Hoosiers are not reinventing the wheel. They are excelling at identifying foundational truths of athleticism and emphasizing fundamentals. Ankle flexion, for instance, contributes to how an athlete loads energy in the lower body and can indicate explosive potential. It is a tenet across all sports, but especially football, which demands sudden changes of direction — cutting through a hole, snapping off a route or dropping weight to deliver force when making a tackle or taking on a block. Players who bend at the waist can indicate stiff ankles and an inability to achieve an athletic stance with proper hip and knee bend. In other words, a waist-bender is likely to have limits to their athletic ceiling.
“The first time in my life I’d ever heard the term ankle stiffness and knee stiffness was from coach Saban and Curt Cignetti,” former Temple and Georgia Tech head coach Geoff Collins said. “I’d never heard that term in my life. Now I constantly use it. I’d never heard that before, but it’s real. I’m watching America’s Home Videos with my daughter with my nine-year-old daughter today, and there’s some kid doing some gymnastics and I’m like, ‘Oh my, look at that ankle stiffness.'”
Collins worked at Alabama as director of player personnel under Cignetti and Saban. Together, they helped identify and build the recruiting classes that laid the foundation for Saban’s dynasty with players such as Julio Jones and Mark Ingram. Collins recalls the meticulous nature of their evaluations. Even with Jones widely regarded as the best receiver in his high school class, the staff still watched every snap of his senior season to better understand his floor and ceiling.
Film sessions with Cignetti and Saban were not highlight cutups showing “the good, bad and ugly.” They were exhaustive studies of how a player operated from the first snap to the last. How did he respond after giving up an explosive play? How did he perform on the snap after a pancake block? Saban often talked about treating every play as its own event, a process-driven approach divorced from outcomes. It has become something of a meme how displeased Cignetti appears whether Indiana wins by one touchdown or seven. Echoing Saban, Cignetti seemed more impressed by a narrow win over a middling Penn State on Omar Cooper’s toe-tapping late touchdown than by a 53-point rout of Illinois that featured dominance in all three phases.
From Alabama, Cignetti bet on himself by taking the head coaching job at IUP, following in his father’s footsteps and leading the Crimson Hawks to multiple double-digit win seasons before a two-year stint at FCS Elon.
As coach of the Phoenix, Cignetti remained true to his evaluation process, staying closely involved and offering instant feedback to assistants while they recruited. With far fewer resources, he was unafraid to stick to his convictions about player fit.
“I was an area coach, and there was this tight end who had a ton of Group of Five offers,” former Elon assistant Jerrick Hall said. “And I’m thinking he has Group of Five offers, surely he can be good enough for Elon. So when I said that to him, and he gave me that instant feedback, and he said, ‘This is not the type of tight end we’re looking for. We’re looking for more of a blocking type of tight end.’ So even though this kid had multiple G5 offers, he had higher stuff than us; he wasn’t attractive because he wasn’t a fit for our scheme.”
Hall also remembers seeing James Carpenter at a summer camp. Carpenter arrived as an offensive lineman, and Hall — now Navy’s defensive line coach — thought he was undersized. Cignetti saw something on tape. Carpenter walked on at James Madison in Cignetti’s first season in 2019, when the program was still in the FCS. He developed into an All-Sun Belt performer in 2022 after JMU moved up and later became a reliable contributor at Indiana in 2024.
Consider defensive standouts D’Angelo Ponds, Aiden Fisher and Mikail Kamara. Each starred at James Madison, followed Cignetti to Indiana and flourished as All-Americans against a higher level of competition. They fit what Cignetti values, and their presence reflects Indiana’s staff continuity. Multiple assistants followed him from JMU, including defensive coordinator Bryant Haines, and only one assistant from the 2024 Indiana staff did not return for 2025. Cignetti’s recent contract extension ensures the Hoosiers’ staff salary pool remains competitive within the Big Ten.
Indiana does have capable front-office staff. Director of player personnel Matt Wilson was recently named FootballScoop.com’s GM of the year. Still, final evaluation decisions rest with Cignetti — a model that has worked so far.
“I think Curt would be a great NFL GM, because he would minimize mistakes in the draft process,” Frank said. “He would minimize mistakes in the free agent process. Because really, that’s what he’s doing today, right? He is the GM. He is evaluating the film. He is making the final decisions, and one thing he puts a premium on is production, and then he knows what he’s looking for in the athletic traits, the athletic skills of every position.”
