Curt Cignetti Speaks About His Journey On Hoosiers Connect Player’s Perspective Podcast

Curt Cignetti went into detail about his journey to get to Indiana and how he stuck to his dream of being a head coach.

Todd Golden | Oct 15, 2024

Indiana Hoosiers head coach Curt Cignetti talks with Indiana Hoosiers wide receiver Andison Coby (0) in the first quarter against the Western Illinois Leathernecks at Memorial Stadium. / Trevor Ruszkowski-Imagn Images

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BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – During the bye week, Indiana football coach Curt Cignetti sat down with the Hoosiers Connect NIL collective, the official NIL collective of Indiana athletics. The Players’s Perspective podcast was released on Monday.

In a wide-ranging interview with guest host Pete Yonkman, Cignetti spoke about many topics. One of them was his journey to become a head coach and his path to get to Indiana.

Cignetti spoke about how he started as a quarterbacks coach at Rice in the 1980s. He also eventually became a recruiting coordinator at Pittsburgh in 1993, but Cignetti had bigger ambitions than being a career assistant coach.

“My dad (Curt Cignetti Sr., who coached West Virginia from 1976-79 and at Indiana University of Pennsylvania from 1986-2005) told me the great thing about this added responsibility is you’re really going to learn a lot. The negative is you do such a good job they’re not going to want to take you out of that position. I got a little pigeon-holed,” Cignetti said.

Cignetti was an assistant at Pittsburgh, North Carolina State and then Alabama with Nick Saban from 2007-10. But coordinator jobs were not forthcoming, much less head coaching opportunities. So Cignetti took matters into his own hands.

“As you move through your career and you’re still an assistant coach and not a coordinator, you get tagged a little bit. So I made a very unconventional move,” Cignetti said. “You probably haven’t seen that move in the coaching industry, that may be a first. I left Alabama.”

“I was hitting the big 5-0 and I did not want to be a career assistant coach. I always wanted to be a head coach. I thought I could be a good head coach. I left Alabama and took a Division II head coaching job at a program in Pennsylvania where my dad led the program for a long time and then retired,” Cignetti explained.

Even though his dad had been a legendary coach at IU-P – he won 182 games there and was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame –, it was still a difficult move to make at that stage of Cignetti’s life.

“My wife was from there, my family was there, my dad and mom were still there, but I took a tremendous pay cut with two girls that wanted to go to med school. A son in college and I woke up many a day wondering what I did,” he said.

Cignetti said he didn’t take the IU-P job with the intent of moving up the ladder, but then the opportunity to coach Elon came up late in 2016. Cignetti wasn’t initially interested.

“We were there for six years, we liked it, I didn’t take that job with the intention of taking another. And we got good,” Cignetti said on his IU-P experience.

“I knew Elon. When I was at NC State, I recruited out that way. I talked to them once or twice when I was at NC State about their job,” Cignetti continued. “By then, I had an agent and I didn’t want to go interview for the job. He said, ‘Just go talk to them.’ I said,’Okay.’ So I’m on the plane and I’m like, ‘What am I doing? Why am I doing this?’

“I get off the plane and go down there and they had built so much since I had been there last,” Cignetti continued. “I remember them being a school of 3,400, now it was 7,500 and it was like a country club. They had nice facilities relative to what we had at IU-P, and it was like three times more money. I looked around and I said, ‘Why can’t you win here?’ I got offered the job, I took the job.”

Elon was not a winner in the years prior to Cignetti’s arrival. Much like the Indiana job Cignetti has now, he had to change the football culture at the school.

“They were like 10-45 (in previous seasons) and nobody thought it could get done there. Nobody. No one at Elon thought it could get done,” Cignetti recalled. “We go in there. We lose at Toledo in the opener, but played hard and played good. Toledo won the MAC that year and won eight in a row and played JMU for what would have been the conference championship. Next year, we went up and beat them.”

James Madison, which was contemplating a move from FCS to FBS football then went after and got Cignetti starting with the 2019 season. Cignetti had no intention of moving on from JMU, but was convinced by the situation at Indiana.

“I loved it (at JMU). I was going to retire there. I had a long-term contract. It was three hours from Indiana, Pa., two-and-a-half from Morgantown (W. Va.) where I grew up, football school and great fan support,” Cignetti said.

“But when Scott (Dolson, Indiana athletic director) called and I talked to Scott and Pam (Whitten, Indiana president), I really felt the commitment. The Big Ten TV contract from a couple of years ago really caught my eye,” Cignetti continued. “I’d been here a couple times with Rice in ’87, NC State in 2000, really liked the campus and the area. By then I was like, I’ve already done this rebuild a few times, why not? Let’s do it.”

Cignetti spoke on many other topics, but he noted that he’s happy at Indiana and doesn’t see himself moving on to another job, even though his 6-0 start will likely bring suitors to his door.

“I like it here a lot. And I really like Scott Dolson and Pam Whitten a lot. As long as we’re committed to being the best we can be? I have everything I need,” Cignetti said. “Now I also know how quickly things can change. You’re on top of the mountain one day and at the bottom the next. I’m not naïve. I have to stay humble and hungry.”

For the entire interview, please watch the link below.

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