It is 2026 and the Indiana Hoosiers are gearing up to play in the National Championship in just over 24 hours. In basketball, right? Wrong. In football. Indiana has rolled to a perfect 15-0 record and heads into Miami as Big Ten champions and Rose Bowl champions with one more mountain left to climb. The man who made this improbable rise possible is second year head coach Curt Cignetti.
Most casual fans know Cignetti as the hard-edged figure who rarely smiles even when his team is up by 50. He demands precision. He commands respect. And the results speak for themselves. He wins.
Once you look at the stops in his coaching journey, none of this dominance feels surprising. After early position coach gigs at Rice and Temple, Cignetti spent seven seasons at Pittsburgh coaching quarterbacks and tight ends from 1993 to 1999. He added recruiting to his responsibilities at NC State from 2000 to 2006 and then joined Nick Saban’s staff at Alabama from 2007 to 2010. At Alabama he helped recruit Mark Ingram, Eddie Lacy, Dont’a Hightower, and Julio Jones while also coaching Jones directly as wide receivers coach.
Cignetti then made a choice that altered his life. He left the lucrative world of high level assistants and took the head coaching job at Indiana University of Pennsylvania from 2011 to 2016. It came with a major pay cut. It also came with control. It was the first step in a head coaching rise that took him to Elon, then James Madison, before Indiana hired him on November 30, 2023. That path matters not only because it turned him into a head coach but because IUP is where his father, Frank Cignetti Sr, played and eventually built his own Hall of Fame career. For Curt, it marked both a professional leap and something close to a return home.
During Sunday’s National Championship press conference, Cignetti was blunt about how much his dad shaped his life.
“I grew up the son of a coach,” he said. “I was the oldest of four. Where he’s from, everybody was a steelworker or coal miner, and it seemed like a pretty cool thing to do for a living. When we went to West Virginia in 1970 and I was on the sideline for all the home games, it was Bobby Bowden’s first year as a head coach in West Virginia, I pretty much knew in my heart what I wanted to do. I don’t know what else I would have done other than coach, to be honest with you.”
Cignetti’s father had taken an assistant job at West Virginia under Bowden in 1970. Bowden went 42-26 with two Peach Bowl appearances before leaving for Florida State in 1976. Frank Cignetti Sr then took over the Mountaineers and became the first coaching role model Curt watched up close.
“I think my dad was a great leader,” Curt said Sunday. “He led by example. He had a certain presence to him. He had a great work ethic and discipline. He overcame cancer twice, my senior year of high school when he was a head coach at West Virginia. He was given his last rites twice. Never really got to quite finish what he started there.”
That battle defined the family. Frank Cignetti Sr fought a rare form of cancer which derailed the 1978 and 1979 seasons and led to his dismissal. West Virginia went on to win the Peach Bowl in 1981, a finish he never got to see through. He recovered, and later became athletic director at IUP, the school where he had once starred as a player.
In 1986 he returned to the sideline as IUP’s head coach and built one of the great Division II programs of his era. Over 20 seasons he amassed a 182-50-1 record before retiring in 2005 to spend more time with family. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2013 and IUP named Frank Cignetti Field in his honor.
Bobby Bowden left a different kind of imprint. When the Cignetti family moved from Pittsburgh to West Virginia, Curt was only nine years old and suddenly orbiting a coaching presence who would become an icon. Bowden left WVU after a Peach Bowl win in 1975 to take over Florida State and spent 34 seasons transforming the Seminoles from a 4-29 stretch into a national powerhouse. His final record was 304-97-4 with two national titles and twelve ACC championships.
Being around Bowden and watching his father work embedded coaching in Curt’s identity before he ever held a whistle.
“Coach Bowden, I can vividly remember a game at Maryland at halftime in the locker room,” Cignetti said. “Something that will stick with me forever in terms of him and the team. I’m not going to share that message. But I just think I learned a lot from my dad and the game. Always knew what I wanted to do and drew from every person throughout my career, assistant and head coach. While my journey is very unique, I think it did prepare me for this particular opportunity and the changes that have taken place in college football.”
Curt’s football education did not stop there. Over time he crossed paths with legendary names like Johnny Majors at Pittsburgh and Nick Saban at Alabama. He even spent one season playing for his father at West Virginia in 1979. The influence of icons piled up, and one more came from outside football altogether.
“I was a big Bob Knight fan as a little kid,” Cignetti said. “I liked sort of the shenanigans and the faces at the press conferences and throwing the chair across the court. I thought that was pretty cool.”
Knight built his own legacy in Bloomington during his 29 seasons as Indiana’s head basketball coach. He won three national titles and produced the last undefeated season in men’s college basketball in 1975-76. Now, fifty years later, Cignetti sits one win away from completing a perfect season of his own. If the Hoosiers beat Miami on Monday, they finish 16-0, but Cignetti was quick to shrug off the parallel.
“It really has no effect on what’s going to take place here at 7:50 tomorrow night,” Cignetti said. “But it was 50 years ago, and if we’re able to climb that mountain, it’ll be a unique coincidence.”
That coincidence will not matter unless Indiana handles business at Hard Rock Stadium. Miami will not go down quietly on its home turf. Four 15-minute quarters remain between the Hoosiers and a national championship. Curt Cignetti has been preparing for this moment since the sideline in Morgantown in 1970. Now he gets his chance to finish what so many of the legends who shaped him taught him to begin.