After a historic season, Curt Cignetti has a clear message for Indiana football

Indianapolis Star

3 days ago

BLOOMINGTON — When the Big Ten convenes its annual football media days, this time in the late July Las Vegas heat, Indiana will arrive a curiosity to the league like it has rarely been in living memory.
The Hoosiers shocked the conference and the country last season, winning 11 games on the way to an appearance in the College Football Playoff. Attrition and, perhaps, the irresistible pull of history have conspired to depress expectations somewhat from the lofty success of 2024. But broadly speaking, everyone still expects IU to be a difficult proposition this fall.
How difficult will be determined by Curt Cignetti, his largely intact staff and a roster reinforced once again through the transfer portal. Talking points in Vegas will include a new quarterback, a new quarterbacks coach, some defensive turnover and how exactly a program with no historical point of comparison builds on what it achieved last year.
Which has made Cignetti's offseason company line all the more fascinating. As the season begins to come into view, IU's second-year coach has gone well out of his way to make this clear: Indiana is fully and completely on to 2025.
'To me, that's inherent in the blueprint,' Cignetti told IndyStar in a wide-ranging sitdown interview recently. 'Every year, you start over regardless of the previous season. You learn the lessons, whatever lessons are there to be learned, file them away, and you start over again.'
In one sense, there is no parallel for what Cignetti will try to do this fall.
Indiana so dramatically outperformed both expectations and historical norms that there are no blueprints (to use his word) here. For the Hoosiers, this season will be territory as uncharted as last season became.
But Cignetti has a long history of his own to pull from. He needed to pull IU-Pennsylvania back to earth after a 12-win season in 2012, to refocus James Madison after long playoff runs in his first three years, or a share of a Sun Belt title in his fourth.
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When Cignetti talks about shifting his team's focus entirely to what's in front of them, he's not speaking about Indiana, but rather from experience. And this approach is not tailored to bringing a program that flew closer to the sun last season than it ever has before back down toward the relative safety of solid ground.
This is how Cignetti restarts his process every season. Learn from the good, digest the bad, move forward purposefully only focused on what's next.
'You learn the lessons of the past,' he said, 'and you use them to your advantage.'
Those lessons are easier to capture, Cignetti said, when he's blessed with the staff continuity he secured this offseason.
Thanks to further investment from IU's administration, Cignetti not only inked his own eight-year contract but also re-signed every member of his staff save quarterbacks coach Tino Sunseri, who left for the offensive coordinator job at UCLA.
Even when USC tested Indiana's resolve in trying to poach Derek Owings, Cignetti's valued head of strength and conditioning, in late spring, Indiana doubled down to keep Owings in Bloomington.
All of which has contributed to meaningful expectation around here for the first time in a long time. IU should begin the season ranked, and oddsmakers setting the win total over/under at 8.5 suggests outsiders still see the Hoosiers as a genuine threat.
'It helps that I've had great staff continuity. We're all on the same page on how we do things,' Cignetti said. 'We all know what we expect, we say it the same way and we demand the same things.'
Those demands begin, it seems, with permanently forward focus. Not because of any fear over complacency after last season's historic success. But because Cignetti — a winner wherever he's been as a head coach — doesn't know any better way to do it than to learn from the past, yes, but only have eyes for the horizon.