Curt Cignetti Backing Up Bold Preseason Claims As Indiana Dominates in 5–0 Start

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.

Indiana Hoosiers head coach Curt Cignetti reacts after winning a game this season en route to a 5–0 record. / Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

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.

“I know a lot of people were like, who’s this f---ing guy?” Cignetti says with a Yinzer accent, his Pittsburgh-area roots slipping out one curled vowel at a time. “I didn’t care. I’m 62, 63 now. I didn’t give a f---.”

That afternoon, the guy hired away from the relative anonymity of James Madison made an in-person appearance on Big Ten Network from Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, where the league championship game between Michigan and Iowa would be played the following day. He signed off with this blast of bombast: “I figured I had to make this trip up here since we’ll be playing in this game next year.”

Back in Bloomington a few hours later, during a timeout in the second half of the Maryland-Indiana men’s basketball game, Cignetti was introduced to the Assembly Hall crowd and given the microphone. His sign-off sent the crowd into a frenzy: “Purdue sucks. But so does Michigan and Ohio State. Go IU!”

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.

Cignetti was full of pent-up gusto when he got off the plane that day—perhaps more than Hoosierdom was prepared for. Some players skipped his introductory team meeting. Others hit the transfer portal. He did not encounter a lot of puffed-out chests in Bloomington.

“I could just detect how downtrodden everybody was, you know what I mean?” Cignetti says. “So they put me out there in front of the basketball crowd. By then, I’m really pissed off. And I said what I said, because I had to get a reaction from them. And the rest is history.”

The history is unfolding in real time—fairly stunning history. Cignetti has led Indiana to its first 5–0 start since 1967, and it’s a dominant 5–0. The Hoosiers are third nationally in scoring offense at 48.8 points per game, 13th in scoring defense at 13 points per game. They’ve won every game by at least two touchdowns and are 2–0 in the Big Ten. They head to Northwestern on Saturday as a 13.5-point favorite, per FanDuel, and could be en route to their first 10-win season.

Who knows, perhaps Indiana can even fulfill Cignetti’s prophecy about playing in the Big Ten title game. The mouse has muscled up.

“No self-imposed limitations,” he says.

Amare Ferrell (25) and Jamier Johnson celebrate a stop against Maryland. / Rich Janzaruk/Herald-Times / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

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.

There have been 21 losing seasons out of 24 this century—and the previous century wasn’t much better. All told, Indiana football has lost 203 more games than it has won. Only Bill Mallory was able to win fairly consistently in the modern era, going 59-43-3 from 1986–94. 

Heading into the 2023 season with a pretty clear knowledge that he was going to have to part ways with Tom Allen, athletic director Scott Dolson commissioned his staff to do a deep dive on the previous 50 years to find out what had worked and—more importantly—what hadn’t. Then he laid out that information next to what had worked at comparable, basketball-centric schools that had put together recent runs of success—Kentucky, Duke, Kansas, North Carolina.

Armed with the knowledge from that study, he formed a checklist of what he wanted in the next coach.

• One with head-coaching experience and a winning record.
• Consistency and continuity in staffing.
• An offensive-minded coach, preferably with experience developing quarterbacks.
• One who had been a recruiting coordinator.

“Cig checked every box,” Dolson says. “He was everything we wanted. We wanted someone who really had a plan, not a one-hit wonder. And so from the minute I first talked to him on the phone, it was like he had our blueprint that we put together. It’s like he had it with them when I was talking to him.”

Despite the lack of name recognition, Cignetti was the fit. And then he went out and got a bunch of players who lacked name recognition, too.

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.

None of Indiana’s top six rushers were on the team last season—there are two transfers from James Madison, (Ty Son Lawton and Kaelon Black), one from Wake Forest (Justice Ellison), one from North Carolina (Elijah Green), a true freshman from outside Indianapolis (Khobie Martin) and the quarterback, Kurtis Rourke, who came in from Ohio University. Five of the top six receivers are transfers, including leading wideout Elijah Sarratt from JMU. The punt returner and third-leading receiver is from Texas Tech (Myles Price). The kickoff returner is from JMU (Solomon Vanhorse). The top four tacklers are from the Sun Belt—three from James Madison and one from Old Dominion. The top three in tackles for loss are from JMU and the fourth is from Kent State. 

The new arrivals might have been spare parts and lower-level players, but they all had stacked up numbers. They fit Cignetti’s “production over potential” mantra.

So it’s not a stretch to say that Indiana imported much of its starting lineup from the G5 ranks to the prestigious Big Ten and got radically better. All they wanted was a chance to show how good they could be.

“I’ve always had a little [chip] on my shoulder,” Cignetti says. “And all those G5 guys—the JMU guys, How come I didn’t get recruited by Virginia or Virginia Tech? This team should have a chip on the shoulder, right?”

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Kurtis Rourke was the No. 1 football prospect in Canada in the class of 2019, which is kind of like being the top surfer in North Dakota. It doesn’t really resonate with the people you’re trying to impress—mainly, college coaches. He was just 6'0" as a junior, and 247Sports rated him a two-star prospect. He wound up following his older brother, Nathan, to Ohio University, and some people thought that was something of a charity recruitment based on familial ties.

But Kurtis kept growing and kept improving, and after Nathan started for three years at Ohio, his little brother started the next four. By 2022, Kurtis stood 6'5" and was named the MAC Offensive Player of the Year, producing more than 3,500 yards of total offense and 29 touchdowns despite missing the last three games of the season due to injury. Ohio went 10–4 and advanced to the MAC championship game.

Rourke’s NFL draft feedback gave him some things to work on for the following season, but 2023 was a down year for him statistically. He hit the portal for his final year, determined to prove he could play on the highest level.

“I felt like I could bet on myself and compete and win,” Rourke says.

Rourke passes against Charlotte earlier this season. / Rich Janzaruk/Herald-Times / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

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.

“You could just see, he knew how to play quarterback,” Cignetti says. “I was with Philip [Rivers] for four years at [North Carolina State] and he reminded me a little bit of Philip—not quite that, but you could just see on tape. He knew how to play the position, and he was the best available for us.”

The two had a mutual urgency.

“He didn’t want to have a normal rebuild,” Rourke says. “He wanted to get guys to play. He wanted to compete right away.”

Rourke was the biggest piece, but just one of many. For the first three weeks of December, Cignetti says he neither arrived at the office nor left it during daylight as he sprinted to secure both a staff and a roster. A whole lot of both came with him from James Madison.

Cignetti brought four staffers on the plane with him to Indiana for his arrival. Others followed. Then the JMU players started flowing in, more than a dozen of them from the team that went 11–2 in just its second season at the FBS level.

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.

“He had no intentions of really saying, ‘We can get as many [from James Madison] as we can,’ ” Dolson says. “He knew he had players there, but didn’t know how many would jump in the portal. When they want to follow your coach, that says a lot. That was a big affirmation for us.”

Counting all sources, Cignetti says he landed 22 transfers in three weeks. All those days coming and going in the dark were worth it.

“In my heart, I knew we had flipped the roster,” he says.

Wide receiver Elijah Sarratt runs after the catch against Maryland. / Rich Janzaruk/Herald-Times / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

This was a veteran bunch of newcomers, bringing maturity and a sense of purpose. Rourke, who got married to his Ohio sweetheart in February, liked what he saw coming together in the spring.

“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.”

At 5–0, Indiana has been one of the surprise successes of the season. Well, not that surprising to the architect himself, who has spent his entire life in the sport as the son of a coach. If only Frank Cignetti Sr., could see what his oldest boy is doing now.

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It was 1970, and 9-year-old Curt Cignetti was in heaven. His father was in his first year as an assistant coach to Bobby Bowden at West Virginia, and the boy had access to everything. He was on the sideline during games, in the locker room at halftime, listening to Bowden—the coaching profession was seeping into his pores.

The move to Morgantown hadn’t come easily, though. After working as a high school coach and an assistant at Pittsburgh, Frank had taken a job on the staff at Princeton. The family had a house on the idyllic campus and hoped to stay for a while. Then Bowden called with a job offer that Frank accepted, only to have reservations.

“He called the moving vans and told them not to come,” Curt says. “They said, ‘Too late, buddy.’ They were on their way.”

After going 42–26 in six seasons at West Virginia, Bowden left to build a dynasty at Florida State. Frank Cignetti was promoted to replace him. He couldn’t sustain the success, going 12–21 through his first three seasons.

Then he nearly died from a rare form of cancer. Frank Cignetti was administered last rites twice, Curt says. Frank underwent a splenectomy and lost 35 pounds, but was determined to come back for the 1979 season—a year in which Curt arrived on campus as a freshman quarterback.

Cignetti walks through drills with defensive players during Indiana football spring practice in March. / Rich Janzaruk/Herald-Times / USA TODAY NETWORK

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.

Five years after Frank retired, Curt did a shocking thing—he left Saban’s burgeoning dynasty at Alabama for the IU Pennsylvania job. He was 50 years old and wanted to be a head coach for the first time in his life.

Among those shocked: Frank Cignetti.

“I didn’t tell my dad I was going to do it,” Curt says. “He’d have gone crazy. I called him the night before the press conference. I had no idea what I was getting into. It wasn’t like when he had that thing humming.”

With his family still in Alabama, Curt moved into his parents’ house. They were spending most of their winters in Florida, but it was still their place. Curt said he would wake up in the morning asking himself, “What did I do?”

But this was what he wanted—the chance to run his own program. And IUP won immediately and consistently during his tenure.

Still, there were times when Frank would chime in on how his son was running things. You follow the old man into the family business, whatever that might be, and it can be tough. Will you ever know as much as he does? Can you ever measure up?

“He was my biggest critic early on,” Curt says. “And he wasn’t afraid to say what was on his mind. But he was really complimentary the last couple years of JMU. I think he knew his health was declining.”

Frank Cignetti died at age 84 on Sept. 10, 2022. He got to see Curt win a lot of games, but he never got to see him doing it at the highest level. What would he think of this dreamy 5–0 start at Indiana?

“He’d say, well,” Curt pauses, his eyes briefly welling up. “He’d say, ‘I like the way you guys play.’ ”