‘Humble and Hungry’: Indiana Isn’t Settling Under Curt Cignetti

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] hurt you. It’s over, you file the lessons away, you learn and you grow from it.”

That was the message Cignetti and his players conveyed to reporters inside the South Seas Ballroom at Mandalay Bay, where far more attention was paid to the Hoosiers than anybody could have imagined prior to last year’s remarkable ascendance. By winning 11 games for the first time in school history and earning an at-large berth in the College Football Playoff — something traditional powers like Miami and Florida still haven’t done — Indiana catapulted itself to a level of relevance normally reserved for the school’s basketball program, a five-time national champion. And with that kind of attention comes an intoxicating blend of scrutiny and expectation most frequently bestowed upon teams and coaches for whom winning is an annual tradition. 

How close Cignetti can come to replicating what happened in 2024, when the only defeats Indiana suffered were against Notre Dame and Ohio State, two teams that went on to reach the national championship game, will be among the Big Ten’s most interesting storylines this fall. That the Hoosiers were picked sixth in both preseason league polls circulated last month will not preclude them from being comfortably included in the national top 25 when the preseason AP Poll surfaces next week, something that has only happened once since 1969 and only three times overall.

But in typical grandiose Cignetti fashion, the idea of simply matching a campaign he described as “the best season in Indiana history” isn’t lofty enough for his liking. 

“I get questions [about] ‘How are you going to sustain it?’” Cignetti said. “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.”

For Cignetti, improving rather than sustaining began with intense player-retention efforts sought to both dissuade key contributors from entering the transfer portal while simultaneously rewarding veterans who passed on the NFL Draft to spend another year at Indiana. The former was successful enough that Cignetti said the Hoosiers didn’t lose “a single player that we wanted to keep,” even though 27 players wound up exiting the program, including five who ended up at Power 4 schools — tight end Sam West (Mississippi State); offensive tackle Austin Barrett (Iowa State); cornerback Jamier Johnson (UCLA); quarterback Tayven Jackson (UCF); wide receiver Donaven McCulley (Michigan). McCulley was the highest-rated former Hoosier in the portal at No. 285 overall, according to 247Sports. 

Indiana’s portal strategy was buoyed by strong financial offers to players who might have been chosen in the middle or late rounds of the draft. Leading receiver Elijah Sarratt, who caught 53 passes for 957 yards and eight touchdowns, said he and Cignetti reached a monetary agreement shortly after the loss to Notre Dame that cemented his decision to return. The Hoosiers also brought back three potential draft picks on defense 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). 

“I think last year [the mindset] was to go in here and win a couple games, you know?” Kamara said. “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 think the difference is that mindset that we had maybe midway, maybe in the back end of the season, is the mindset that we have going into the first game 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 clutter,” 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 want to go to the College Football Playoff and lose in Round 1 again,” Sarratt said. “That’s not the goal. The goal is to win a national championship. That’s what we’re working hard to do every single day.”

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 transfer, No. 4 QB), former Notre Dame offensive lineman Pat Coogan (No. 138 transfer, 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 are resting on your laurels,” Cignetti said, “and you got the warm fuzzies based on what social media is telling you, or what you read on social media, and you think it’s just going to happen again because it happened before, [then] you ain’t going to be a very happy camper when the season is over. My job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. 

“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 that means dreaming of a national championship. 

Michael Cohen covers college football and college basketball for FOX Sports. Follow him at @Michael_Cohen13.

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