Indiana Hires Curt Cignetti

The Hoosiers have their next head football coach.

Well, Indiana has done it. The Hoosiers announced Thursday afternoon that former James Madison head coach Curt Cignetti is Indiana’s next head coach, replacing Tom Allen after 7 years. 

There’s an infinite amount of ideas to discuss now and in the coming weeks and months, but this is just a quick reaction to the hire.

Indiana has made it clear – given buying out Allen for north of $15 million, offering 3 million additional NIL dollars, and (presumably) out-bidding other programs for Cignetti rather than settling for a second option – that it’s willing to provide financial opportunity to the next head coach in Bloomington. And, given Cignetti’s age, he must believe, after reviewing Indiana’s current situation and resources, that the Hoosiers can win sooner rather than later (“One day at a time,” he said in this short video). This hire should render plenty of excitement and bodes well for Indiana’s commitment to the program in the near-future. 

One of the top priorities for the next coach at Indiana was head coaching experience – hence names like Paul Chryst, Jason Candle, and Tom Herman also in consideration. Cignetti doesn’t offer too much FBS head coaching experience (two seasons) and zero Power 5 head coaching experience, but at any level he’s led a program in the last 13 years, the teams have succeeded, including James Madison out-performing Indiana by a wide margin in its only two FBS seasons.  

View on Twitter

A major reason why a program would want a head coach with experience is – alongside leadership, construction, and management experience – longevity. The immediate example for Indiana is the hiring process. As has been discussed in Bite-Sized Bison and the IU fanbase at large, Allen’s tenure began to flame out with the departures of Kalen DeBoer and Kane Wommack, who Allen failed to adequately replace. A coach like Cignetti offers ties to a wider network of coaches and advisors, leading to more sustainable options when assistants inevitably leave Bloomington (that won’t stop). Looking at his current staff at James Madison, most of the assistants are promising, young, competent coaches (and three – Marcus Hall-Oliver, Pat Kuntz, and Briant Haines – have ties to Indiana), not aging coaches who are timing out of the sport, which is a bit of an anomaly for a 62-year-old coach.

Some of the more tangible aspects in addition to head coaching experience are previously being the recruiting coordinator for Nick Saban at Alabama and recruiting/coaching college (and NFL) stars Mark Ingram, Julio Jones, and Dont’a Hightower and coaching Philip Rivers and Russell Wilson at NC State. His father, Frank, is a College Football Hall of Fame coach and employed Saban as a DBs coach at West Virginia in 1978-79. Cignetti’s ties go deep into the college football landscape. For more information about his coaching experience, read Indiana’s announcement. 

It’s been said often with Cignetti, but he really has done a lot with less. The chart below, using CollegeFootballData.com’s original chart depicting where head coaches have inherited various Power 5 programs since 2015, conveys this as fact.

View on Twitter

Notes:

• The red asterisk shows where Tom Allen is leaving the Indiana program, in terms of talent (x axis) and quality (y axis). 

• The purple asterisk shows where Cignetti is leaving James Madison, but it doesn’t exactly fit on the chart. JMU’s Talent Composite is 196 (!!), while its Elo rating is 1835. 

Pairing this chart with a graph from a recent BSB piece (shown below) offers encouragement for what Cignetti has the opportunity to do with the talent that is already on the roster (or needs to be retrieved from the portal) and was not maximized with the 2023 IU staff.

Sources: ESPN SP+, 247Sports

Given the talent already on the roster, though, this team could look very different come next season. Cignetti and his staff will need to build according to their own systems, and there’s a possibility that process might take a year to cement itself. The scholarship chart is a bit of a mess, both because of the patchwork of last offseason in the transfer portal and because of the uncertainty of nearly every player on the roster, and Indiana’s current 2024 recruiting class ranks 53rd in the nation (15th of 18 in the Big Ten). 

But like was mentioned in the last BSB piece about the transfer portal after a head coach departure, besides being a top program with sustained success, there is never a better time for a staff to promote a vision for a program than when it’s just beginning. That’s for both portal players and recruits. 

And when looking at the first graph in this article, Cignetti has handled transition quickly, whether it’s a weaker FCS football program like Elon or an FCS power in James Madison or the transition from FCS to FBS in 2022. Cignetti usually makes short work of these transitions, but this might be his toughest yet. 

Just look at the contrast between the two programs in 2023:

View on Twitter

There are plenty of concerns remaining, of course:

• Will Cignetti put his duties on ice in preparation for James Madison’s bowl game?

• Can Cignetti bring back some talent from the portal and add talent from elsewhere?

• Can Cignetti recruit the Midwest, or  can he change Indiana’s perception in various recruiting circles?

• What if Cignetti’s head coaching success doesn’t translate to the Big Ten?

• Is IU actually hoping to sustain this investment in football?

Some of those questions will be answered in short time, but many of the others will take awhile to understand, for sure. For now, it’s okay to celebrate that Indiana has made what seems to be a quality hire and is receiving positive feedback from most corners of the college football stratosphere – somewhat of a deviance from the norm for the Hoosiers.

There is still plenty more to discuss about this hire, and I’m personally extremely excited to see how he constructs his staff and roster from here on. So you can bet I’ll be here doing more of this analysis. 

---