LAS VEGAS — In the immediate aftermath of Indiana’s season-ending loss to Notre Dame during the opening round of last year’s College Football Playoff, its lightning rod head coach, Curt Cignetti, trudged into the visiting media room at Notre Dame Stadium with hollow guts and wounded pride.
For the better part of five months, Cignetti and his players had transformed into nationwide darlings while authoring one of the greatest turnarounds the sport has ever seen. But on this December evening in South Bend, as the 12-team format was unveiled for the first time, the Hoosiers endured a one-sided whipping. All that separated Cignetti & Co. from a more humiliating scoreline were two late touchdowns once the outcome had long been secured.
“The hardest thing on a night like this is saying ‘goodbye’ to your kids,” Cignetti said to begin the news conference after sharing a postgame embrace with his family. “They’re hurting because their old man got his a– kicked.”
The emptiness of it all transported Cignetti back to a lowly moment from 2011, during his first season as a collegiate head coach, when he allowed a similarly painful defeat to hover over his program, much to the detriment of everyone involved. Then in charge at IUP — that’s Indiana University of Pennsylvania for anyone unfamiliar with Division II football — Cignetti wallowed in the wake of a 20-6 loss to Slippery Rock in which the Crimson Hawks’ quarterbacks combined to throw four interceptions. It gnawed at him for days.
“I just couldn’t let it go,” Cignetti said when retelling the story at Big Ten Media Days last month. “And it hurt us the next couple of weeks, too, you know? You can’t let this one [against Notre Dame] damage you. It’s over, you file the teachings away, you be taught and you develop from it.”
That was the message Cignetti and his gamers conveyed to reporters contained in the South Seas Ballroom at Mandalay Bay, the place much more consideration was paid to the Hoosiers than anyone might have imagined previous to final yr’s exceptional ascendance. By profitable 11 video games for the primary time at school historical past and incomes an at-large berth within the College Football Playoff — something traditional powers like Miami and Florida still haven’t done — Indiana catapulted itself to a stage of relevance usually reserved for the varsity’s basketball program, a five-time nationwide champion. And with that sort of consideration comes an intoxicating mix of scrutiny and expectation most steadily bestowed upon groups and coaches for whom profitable is an annual custom.
How shut Cignetti can come to replicating what occurred in 2024, when the one defeats Indiana suffered have been towards Notre Dame and Ohio State, two groups that went on to succeed in the nationwide championship sport, shall be among the many Big Ten’s most fascinating storylines this fall. That the Hoosiers have been picked sixth in each preseason league polls circulated final month won’t preclude them from being comfortably included within the nationwide prime 25 when the preseason AP Poll surfaces subsequent week, one thing that has solely occurred as soon as since 1969 and solely 3 times total.
But in typical grandiose Cignetti vogue, the thought of merely matching a marketing campaign he described as “the best season in Indiana history” isn’t lofty sufficient for his liking.
“I get questions [about] ‘How are you going to sustain it?’” Cignetti mentioned. “We’re not looking to sustain it. We’re looking to improve it. And the way you do that is by having the right people on the bus, upstairs in the coaches’ offices, downstairs in the locker room. Having a blueprint plan and process, high standards of expectations [and] never lowering your standards.”
Head coach Curt Cignetti of the Indiana Hoosiers reacts in the course of the fourth quarter towards Michigan. (Photo by Justin Casterline/Getty Images)
For Cignetti, enhancing moderately than sustaining started with intense player-retention efforts sought to each dissuade key contributors from getting into the switch portal whereas concurrently rewarding veterans who handed on the NFL Draft to spend one other yr at Indiana. The former was profitable sufficient that Cignetti mentioned the Hoosiers didn’t lose “a single player that we wanted to keep,” though 27 gamers wound up exiting this system, together with 5 who ended up at Power 4 faculties — tight finish Sam West (Mississippi State); offensive deal with Austin Barrett (Iowa State); cornerback Jamier Johnson (UCLA); quarterback Tayven Jackson (UCF); broad receiver Donaven McCulley (Michigan). McCulley was the highest-rated former Hoosier within the portal at No. 285 total, based on 247Sports.
Indiana’s portal technique was buoyed by robust monetary provides to gamers who may need been chosen within the center or late rounds of the draft. Leading receiver Elijah Sarratt, who caught 53 passes for 957 yards and eight touchdowns, mentioned he and Cignetti reached a financial settlement shortly after the loss to Notre Dame that cemented his choice to return. The Hoosiers additionally introduced again three potential draft picks on protection in edge rusher Mikail Kamara (nation-leading 68 quarterback pressures), inside linebacker Aiden Fisher (team-high 118 tackles) and cornerback D’Angelo Ponds (first-team All-Big Ten).
Indiana DE Mikail Kamara #6 pressures Michigan QB Davis Warren #16 in the course of the first half at Memorial Stadium. (Photo by Justin Casterline/Getty Images)
“I think last year [the mindset] was to go in here and win a couple games, you know?” Kamara mentioned. “Maybe go and win a bowl game. If we’re being quite honest, I think that was kind of the goal. And once we started rolling, the goal started to change a little bit. So I think the way that it changed is we expected to win games and we expected to win games big. And we expected to make the playoffs and try to go to the national championship, right?
“So I believe the distinction is that mindset that we had perhaps halfway, perhaps within the again finish of the season, is the mindset that now we have going into the primary sport this season: Win a championship and that’s it.”
Predictably, that mindset starts with Cignetti himself and a challenge the head coach issued to everyone within Indiana’s program. Regardless of what the outside world is saying about the Hoosiers — and many analysts believe they could be in the mix for a second consecutive playoff berth — Cignetti wants them to approach each day “humble and hungry versus noise and litter,” which means understanding that last year’s success guarantees Indiana nothing in 2025 and beyond.
His message is already being carried out by some of the team’s best players, a handful of whom are still holdovers from Cignetti’s last job at James Madison and followed him to help overhaul the culture at Indiana. For Kamara, who enters 2025 as one of the conference’s most feared edge rushers, that has meant improving his conditioning and body composition so that he can play to his full potential for all four quarters, an improvement he believed was necessary after admitting he faded late in games last year. For Sarratt, whose goal is to become a first-round pick in next year’s NFL Draft, that has meant shoring up his blocking, sharpening his route running and becoming more consistent as a pass catcher to avoid the untimely drops that resulted in him falling just short of 1,000 yards — a statistic that he said still irks him.
“We don’t need to go to the College Football Playoff and lose in Round 1 once more,” Sarratt said. “That’s not the purpose. The purpose is to win a nationwide championship. That’s what we’re working exhausting to do each single day.”
Indiana WR Elijah Sarratt (13) celebrates after scoring a touchdown during a game against Michigan. (Photo by Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Their belief that Indiana is a program capable of contending for the playoff most seasons began trickling down to the team’s newcomers during spring practice, where Cignetti welcomed a high school recruiting class that ranked 49th nationally and a transfer portal class that ranked 25th nationally — two spots behind Texas and one spot behind Ohio State. The additions of high-profile transfers like former Cal quarterback Fernando Mendoza (No. 22 switch, No. 4 QB), former Notre Dame offensive lineman Pat Coogan (No. 138 switch, No. 9 IOL) and former Maryland tailback Roman Hemby (No. 236 transfer, No. 15 RB), all of whom will start for Indiana in 2025, are a direct result of the program’s headline-generating trajectory in 2024.
In listening to the Hoosiers speak at Big Ten Media Days, where they exuded far more confidence than Indiana players of yore, any concern Cignetti might have had about a hangover from the loss to Notre Dame seems like it can be safely erased. They filed those lessons away, they’ve learned, and they’ve grown — just as Cignetti did when he lost to Slippery Rock so many years before.
“If you might be resting in your laurels,” Cignetti said, “and you bought the nice and cozy fuzzies based mostly on what social media is telling you, or what you learn on social media, and you suppose it is simply going to occur once more as a result of it occurred earlier than, [then] you ain’t going to be a really comfortable camper when the season is over. My job is to guarantee that does not occur.
“I know I got to improve in a lot of ways, but I’m really good at keeping the main thing the main thing and being a watchdog for complacency and stomping it out. When we go to camp and we get ready for that first game, these guys will be thinking like we need them to think.”
And which means dreaming of a nationwide championship.
Michael Cohen covers school soccer and school basketball for FOX Sports. Follow him at @Michael_Cohen13.
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