Indiana's history of misery is no threat to Curt Cignetti
At a D1 program with more losses than any other, how do you defeat the inevitable?
Note: rankings for this series are set by the final 2023 rankings from TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings.
Difficult jobs in the power conferences don’t typically exist on the same scale as they do in G5 leagues. Programs where there are serious institutional barriers to success, like having money to invest or being willing to invest it in football, are few and far between at such a high level. More often, perennial bottom-feeders like Illinois and even Vanderbilt have the resources to succeed, and making a good hire can get them to the top very quickly. The Illini reached the AP top 15 in Bret Bielema’s second season; the Commodores finished ranked in James Franklin’s second and third campaigns.
Holding onto those coaches and their success is another question, of course, but getting there in the first place isn’t the main challenge. It’s hard to think of any team in the P4 that’s truly incapable of getting up into, say, nine-win territory within two years of a new hire, three at the very most.
And then there’s Indiana.
The Hoosiers’ football program is a fascinating one in many ways. The athletic department as a whole has obviously found plenty of success; men’s basketball is a titan of its sport, with five NCAA titles and 41 tournament appearances, while women’s basketball has recently become a premier program, hosting regionals as a top-four seed in four straight seasons. Yet Indiana isn’t just bad in football—they have never won more than nine games in a season, and they haven’t done even that since 1967. Not counting this year’s hire, fourteen coaches have led the program since the last one to bow out with a career winning record at IU.
It might be a little misleading to set the Hoosiers’ bar at nine wins, to be fair. In 2020, the strangest of all seasons, they went 6-2 and genuinely looked good, taking down then-ranked Penn State, Michigan, and Wisconsin teams on the way to their first ranked finish since 1988. Theoretically, they could’ve gone 10-3 in a full season…but that raises the question of how much COVID-19 played a factor in Indiana’s success that year, given the uncharacteristic struggles of numerous Big Ten powerhouses that largely reverted to normal in 2021. Subsequent years haven’t made it any clearer; the Hoosiers immediately collapsed to 2-10 (0-9) the following year and struggled through two more abysmal seasons before firing Tom Allen.
It took a long time to make that move, sure, but what else can you do? Allen’s 8-5 campaign in 2019 was the first time Indiana had won that many games since 1993, and with program woes that overwhelming, it makes sense to chase any hint of success, no matter how unlikely a rebound might be. This is a team that even the legendary Lee Corso couldn’t do better than 41-68-2 with, and there’s a certain level of hopelessness to trying to make a new hire here, knowing just how immensely the odds are stacked against it working out. How do you even settle on a candidate, knowing how difficult the job is (and how unattractive that makes it to top G5 candidates who could be up for other power-conference positions)?
Well, if you can find somebody who’s gone 52-9 across FCS and FBS at his last stop, that’s a good start. For once, Indiana didn’t really have to agonize over this choice; what’s far more fascinating is the fact that Curt Cignetti, who took James Madison from a top CAA team to a top Sun Belt team in his five years there, took this job. Beyond broad regional ties that would honestly line up better with the mid-Atlantic, he doesn’t have any particular connections to Indiana, and his performance at JMU was undeniably exceptional enough to earn him consideration at better P4 jobs. Why this one? Why does he expect to succeed where so many have failed?
The answer is, perhaps, unsurprising: sheer, reckless confidence. When asked about his vision on recruiting in his opening press conference, his response pretty much summed up how little he fears the difficulty of this job: “I win. Google me.” The way he saw it when offered the job at Indiana, “I’d already done this turnaround twice”—at D2 IUP, which he took from 6-5 to 12-2 in two years, and at FCS Elon, which he took from 2-9 to 8-4 in one. Above all else, his reply in an interview with ESPN when posed with the question “Why can it happen here?” is telling.
Why can’t it happen here?
He’s not wrong, is he? Indiana is a school with a ton of advantages that have turned men’s and women’s basketball into the historic and modern powerhouses they are, and it’s not like football gets completely ignored. Even with more investment going into hoops, the second-biggest alumni base in the nation and the revenue stream of being a Big Ten member should make this a competitive program, at the very least. There’s no reason it can’t be a Vanderbilt or an Illinois, at the very least: capable of contending with the right mix of well-timed talent acquisition and excellence on the sidelines.
Cignetti clearly believes in himself and his staff to provide the latter. Given that he’s been a head coach since 2011 and is still yet to have a single losing season, I’m inclined to believe him. Taking advantage of the resources at Indiana’s disposal might be more difficult, but it’s always been possible on paper, and there are worse strategies for overcoming the historical difficulty of winning here than simply ignoring it and charging full steam ahead.
Will it actually work? Well, that’s obviously impossible to say at this point. But whether it can is another question, one that’s typically been more relevant at Indiana, and it’s not hard to see things the way Cignetti does and respond, simply…
Why not?
The Last Five Years
Each of Indiana’s last three seasons have ended in almost exactly the same place. They managed to steal three conference wins across 2022 and 2023 after that 0-9 season in 2021, but for the most part, they just got repeatedly blown out by the conference’s best and couldn’t quite hang on against other programs near the bottom. It’s not like there wasn’t anything to work with on the roster, though—even in 2023, after three years of this misery, the Hoosiers still ranked ninth in the Big Ten in team talent composite, in the same territory as programs like Maryland and Indiana.
A decent amount of that talent is back in 2024, too. Indiana ranked a respectable 85th in returning production at the start of the offseason, and they’ve signed a whopping 22 players in the portal, fifth-most in the country. It’s obviously important to temper expectations a bit, and I’d lean towards Cignetti finally taking that first losing season of his career before the rebuild begins in earnest, but there’s more to work with here than at some other teams we’ve looked at. It really wouldn’t take a whole lot for the Hoosiers to be good, even with the state they’ve been in lately.
The Next Five Years
I am a strong believer in history when it comes to analyzing college football. Being aware of how the sport changes, and how it doesn’t, is vital in setting expectations and projections for programs—and for those changes, from things as massive and sweeping as the advent of NIL and the transfer portal to lesser shifts like new hires and periods of AD investment.
And history tells us that Indiana is a difficult job in a way few, if any, other power-conference jobs are. There is simply no blueprint for how to create a consistent winner here; they haven’t finish with a winning record in three straight seasons since World War II. The closest thing to a comparison for what Cignetti hopes to build in Bloomington is the late ‘80s and early ‘90s era of Hoosier football, and even that success is from an era almost incomparable to the modern day.
But if you refuse to acknowledge the odds, sometimes they just disappear. Cignetti refuses to approach this program with any fatalism or apprehension—his approach demands nothing less than total commitment, an illogical but necessary certainty that Indiana can and will be good under his watch. Whether he’ll be right is one question; whether that’s the right approach is another one, and it’s a lot easier to answer. Before the Hoosiers can start working toward a brighter future, they need to believe it’s possible, and nobody is more confident of that fact than their new head coach.