BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Curt Cignetti sat with his right leg crossed over his left, his hands resting atop his head. Perched in his office several stories above the north-facing Memorial Stadium endzone, he’s somehow more comfortable than the black leather couch he’s reclining back in.
His furniture rivals an IKEA setup – bare of any real decorations, save a sporadic few IU football helmets spanning multiple eras of on-field looks. Even the candy-striped chrome helmet is set atop one of the shelves of his behind-desk hutch. Most of it hasn’t moved since he first made the space his own.
“For my office really to look sharp,” Cignetti told TheHoosier.com, “somebody will have to come in here and do it. On the list of priorities, right now, it’s down there.”
Instead, the impending approach of spring football season offers the first-year Hoosier head coach time to dive head-first into tape study for hours on end. Upon walking through the door to his still-fresh sanctuary, a massive projector takes up all the real estate of the room’s east wall. On this morning, footage of redzone offense from an Arizona game is paused.
The aim of his study is to learn what’s changing schematically, keep pulse on the emerging trends that make offenses successful and how it can then be incorporated into what he envisions for his own offense. His coaching career is laden with offensive assistant positions, and as a former quarterback himself, the preliminary focus of his sessions resides on that side of the ball.
The only deviation comes when he’s preparing for opponent defenses.
“Even then,” Cignetti said, “I’m looking at what hurts them.”
In all, it’s the right combination of personnel utilization and situational awareness that allows him to fulfill his true duties as head coach – lead his team to wins on Saturdays. In the 13 years he’s had oversight of a team preceding this one, he’s had exponential success in doing just that.
So when a 62-year-old coach, who will be 63 by the time kickoff rolls around this fall, claims he’s too young to quit growing, there’s a method to his madness. He’s always been comfortable being uncomfortable.
Because whether it’s in the self-earned reputation for being a program rebuild whisperer – “I guess that is my history, right?” – or elevating his prior stops to newer heights, nothing is guaranteed about the business he operates in.
He stalks complacency, waging a ‘tenacious war’ against it. Average is his enemy.
So when most others would turn away from the challenge of another rebuild and instead opt for the safer route, Cignetti sprints toward it.
“Sometimes in life you’ve got to take chances,” Cignetti said. “You can play it close to the vest, but every once in a while, you got to roll the dice.”
And IU is pushing all of its chips his direction.
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Cignetti didn’t tell his father, Frank Cignetti Sr., a 2013 College Football Hall of Fame inductee, he was taking the job at Indiana University Pennsylvania until the night before his introductory press conference.
The move his son, Curt, was making classifies as unprecedented. Holding positions as an assistant on Nick Saban’s first Alabama staffs to coach wideouts and coordinate recruiting, Cignetti was taking the head coaching job with the Division II IUP Crimson Hawks, less than 50 miles as the crow flies from his Pittsburgh roots.
“The night before the press conference, I let him know,” Cignetti said. “He would’ve been like, ‘No way.’ I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to hear it.”
On record for saying under Saban’s watch, Cignetti learned more from his short stint at Alabama than he did anywhere else in his extensive coaching career before Tuscaloosa, the jump was one he believed could be beneficial, regardless of the level he’d be coaching at. There, Cignetti said, he could afford to make the mistakes a young coach does while still improving his team.
A gasp of exhaustion escapes when reflecting upon the day-to-day grind the job required. “Oh my gosh,” he mutters, tired by just the thought of placing himself back in the shoes he once occupied. He was more than just the CEO modern head coaching positions now resemble – Cignetti was in charge of fundraising for the program, emptying the facilities’ garbage when the campus would shut down for break and other excruciatingly mundane chores.
He remembers back upon an instance in his final season with the Crimson Hawks, when they’d advanced to the second round of the Division II Championship. The university was going through a planned overhaul of the campus Internet network, and his staff didn’t have access to opponent tape until Thursday of that week. “How about that,” Cignetti scoffed.
In just six seasons with IUP, however, he’d turned a team that lost 10 of 14 conference games in the two years prior to his arrival into a program that only dropped 11 PSAC games across his more than half-decade manning the sidelines. What was almost certainly the toughest challenge of his career to that point, he’d passed with flying colors.
“There were many a morning I woke up, like, ‘What did I do,’” Cignetti said. “But it all worked out.”
The impact Frank Sr. had on his son’s own trajectory was “tremendous,” but the return Curt saw on his own investment paid off. The willingness to take new risks, Cignetti said, was one of the only true differences between them.
“He was always very conservative,” Cignetti said. “He didn’t like to move.”
There’s a certain tone his voice takes when remembering Frank Sr., who passed in September 2022. It’s almost uncharacteristic for someone as bold-mannered as he is to come down a level where his booming, thunderous tone is reduced to a low hum. It’s as if although Frank Sr. isn’t physically in the room, he’s still there with Curt.
“He affected a lot of people positively,” Cignetti said.
Their career paths took different routes, and Curt isn’t exactly sure what his father would say about his latest stop – although he sometimes can’t help but wonder. But it’s in the outreach toward others, the positive remembrance, where he truly hopes to follow in his father’s footsteps.
“I try to do right.”
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There’s an old adage somewhere about the importance of having a strong woman behind every strong man. Cignetti doesn’t pay it any mind.
“She’s always been the superstar,” Cignetti said, referring to his wife, Manette.
So often forgotten in a move amongst an industry predicated on performance is the behind-the-scenes process of uprooting and packing a whole life in one area away, only to replant somewhere completely new. Curt, inheriting a ‘roster crisis’ and an understanding of the inherent need to overhaul Indiana’s current situation for a successful first season on campus, didn’t have much time built into his 20 days of 4th-and-one to do much else than sink his teeth into Indiana’s football program.
Eventually, she was able to get them away to Cancun for a week in February. It was Curt’s first real time out of the office since taking the job. Manette, to no surprise, was handling everything else.
“I haven’t paid a bill in 34 years. I have my same Lay-Z-Boy. She handles all that stuff,” Curt said. “I mean, she really raised the kids.”
Curt had a role in his children’s upbringing. But while he couldn’t be around all the time due to the extreme needs of his previous positions as an assistant, Manette took the lead in keeping things organized and in-line. Now, it’s easier to take the risks Curt is now, moving halfway across the country with their three kids out of the house. Still, she’s managed to help make the transition seamless.
He picked the house in Bloomington, but everything else has been handled by her. “I’m not involved in another detail,” he said.
That meant multiple trips to and from Bloomington to Harrisonburg, including bringing the Lay-Z-Boy that, despite not fitting the house’s color scheme at all, is sat right in the TV room of his new home.
But as they settle, she’ll be able to be on the road more often and around her husband in his line of work, which is more accurately is described as his lifestyle. Even then, Cignetti’s true identity as an unflappable family man shines through.
“To me, I love that,” Cignetti said during his introductory press conference. “I think it just enriches everything and makes it more meaningful.”
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The date is Friday, December 1. Several courtside seats inside Assembly Hall, once occupied, now sat empty.
Cignetti’s whirlwind first day on the job was coming to a conclusion. Around 10 a.m., he was greeted by spitting rain, cheerleaders and IU’s pep band as he exited the private jet that flew the new Hoosier head coach from Harrisonburg to Bloomington. A sprinter van sat waiting to transport him to Memorial Stadium, where he had no more than an initial tour of the facilities and a brief team meeting ensued before rushing up to Indianapolis for a noon meeting with the Big Ten Network crew. All of a sudden, at 2:30 p.m., he was back in Indiana’s team room for his introductory press conference.
Now, it was 7:15 p.m.. and he was taking in his first IU basketball game as an employee of the university. His welcoming parade, however, was far from over.
Video boards all throughout the arena advertised him photoshopped into an IU polo with a link to buy season tickets. Buzz abounded from the building. Gifted courtside seats by one of IU’s donors, this was supposed to be the more relaxing way to end the day.
Then, at the first half under-12 timeout, Cignetti emerged from one of the south tunnels. He was still donning the slate gray suit he’d been in all day, only missing the crimson-colored tie. He raised two fists to the sky as a standing ovation serenaded his strut to midcourt.
IU led Maryland, but basketball be damned. On this night in hoops country, the stage – as it did all day – belonged to the football coach.
Then, he began talking.
I’ve never taken a backseat to anybody and don’t plan on starting now!
Rousing applause followed as the sold-out building hung on his every word. There was no knocking him from the perch he’d built for himself.
Purdue sucks, and so do Michigan and Ohio State!
The act, he says, was spontaneous – not planned in the slightest. Cignetti was only giving the fan base a glimpse at the kind of person they were getting.
“I needed to kind of stir things up a bit,” Cignetti said. “They just hand you a microphone and you kind of let yourself go. Now, I could go out there and, you know, say hello, and everybody just go- *starts golf clapping.* But when you’re out in the middle of the court, you’re there to get a reaction from 17,000 people, right?”
He understood some of the negative response that came from it, both from opposition and some supporters of the program. To him, that’s just the nature of what he does. It was more so the fact a response was garnered at all told him all he needed to know.
“I had to find out if the fan base was asleep or just dead,” Cignetti continued.
Then, from the side of his face, a small smile broke out.
“They just needed to get excited again about something.”
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In terms of winning seasons, it’s taken Indiana 56 years to amount the same success Cignetti has had in his first 13 as a head coach.
Although he’s increasingly adamant that, no, he doesn’t plan on taking a backseat to anyone, Cignetti knows something has to give.
“It’s not going to be me,” Cignetti said.
That same type of confidence he toted when taking the IUP, Elon and James Madison head coaching positions yielded nothing but positives. Some of the early press conferences are eerily similar, calling upon the same idea of what it means to overtake a program and reimagine its identity, its culture and its attack to winning games. Most everyone is well aware of what’s happened since. Indiana wouldn’t be trusting him otherwise.
The bravado it comes with it is built upon the foundation of results. Full of braggadocio, he’s tasking himself with wiping the slate clean of Indiana football as the world knows it, kicking down doors and shrugging off doubt that opposes him. He’s done this before, and to this point, he’s not been served reason to believe he can’t do it again.
“Facts are stubborn things,” Cignetti said. “They don’t lie.”
Unafraid to mix things up, Cignetti isn’t here to make friends – “Our opponents shouldn’t like us,” he reasons. Rather, he’s here in Bloomington to win football games, to develop a brand, to reinstill a love for Indiana football.
Proof will ultimately come in the progress, and until there’s a scoreboard and a team is deemed a winner or loser, there’s no true measure. But all signs indicate one way, that IU’s investment in a coach who’s always invested in himself could help steer Indiana football in a direction it has so desperately desired to go.
And he won’t take no for an answer, either.
“How could you?”
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