No. 2 Indiana football is 11-0 in 2025 after going 11-1 in 2024. It’s an unprecedented run of success for one of college football’s historically worst programs and it was all sparked by one consequential hire: Curt Cignetti.
Indiana’s athletics department, keenly aware of football’s ever-rising importance in the collegiate landscape, made the decision to move on from Tom Allen after a disappointing 2023 season. Allen had taken the Hoosiers to substantial heights with winning seasons in 2019 and 2020,
but wasn’t able to pull the program out of a tailspin after a disastrous 2-10 finish in 2021.
This isn’t a hire the Hoosiers could afford to whiff on. Gridiron success determined the latest round of power conference realignment, with schools like Oregon State and Washington State getting left in the dust after the collapse of the Pac-12. Those two have better histories than Indiana. If it could happen to them, it could happen to the Hoosiers.
What Indiana athletic director Scott Dolson needed was a winner. He found that in James Madison coach Curt Cignetti, who saw rebuilding one of the sport’s most downtrodden programs as the final challenge of his lengthy career.
Easy, right? Just go find a coach who wins big at the lower levels. The next Curt Cignetti could be out there coaching in the Group of Five, FCS or a lower division entirely. It’s the same approach that landed Alabama Kalen DeBoer, who won three NAIA titles at Sioux Falls.
Well, no.
It’s far, far more complex than just hiring a proven winner. Cignetti didn’t walk into a truly dreadful situation all things considered, he had quite a few resources and existing pieces at his disposal to help him turn Indiana into a winner in a single offseason.
For one, Dolson isn’t just any athletic director, he’s just about an Indiana institution at this point. Having attended IU and worked for the men’s basketball program as a student manager under Bob Knight, few have their finger on the pulse of their landscape in the way Dolson does.
He was promoted to lead the department into the future following the 2020 retirement of his predecessor, Fred Glass, and entered the role with the sort of experience the moment called for. The transfer portal and NIL were about to change college sports as we knew them, and Indiana needed to be proactive.
Dolson, who’d spent over a decade as Indiana’s Deputy Director of Athletics and chief operating officer, was ready. He’d spent years helping lead the way for several construction and renovation projects to bring Indiana’s facilities into the modern age. Oh, and he was director of the Varsity Club, meaning he managed the department’s fundraising program for scholarships, annual giving, endowments and athletic facilities.
Pretty important. And timely.
Dolson was incredibly well positioned to make sure Cignetti had the financial backing he needed to turn Indiana around, from facilities upgrades to NIL funding. This certainly came into play when Indiana moved to keep Cignetti in Bloomington with two new contracts.
But, on top of that, there’s a reason that money was pretty readily available and it lies across the parking lot.
Indiana’s identity for pretty much the entirety of its existence as an athletic entity has been the men’s basketball program. People around the globe know what Indiana basketball is, the trident is synonymous with the hardwood. They also know Indiana hasn’t experienced high-level success in a decade or national success in over two.
There are very many people around Indiana who are incredibly invested, emotionally and financially, in the Hoosiers’ success. As the years went by and the men’s basketball program failed to return to true, consistent national relevance, things soured.
If someone in that position is unwilling to invest in something that lets them down time and again, maybe they’d be more inclined to put that money elsewhere to find similar success. Enter Dolson and this winning, no-n0nsense coach he’d just hired. Maybe take a chance on that for once.
One 22-2 record later and that’s looking like a pretty good investment, the kind that sort of person would like to keep investing in. Football has brought Indiana the national relevance and winning record that men’s basketball has failed to capture. All that funding had to go somewhere, after all.
On top of all of this, Cignetti’s final JMU roster and staff was loaded with guys who were in a position to keep the standard high. Defensive coordinator Bryant Haines and offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan spent years cutting their teeth on Cignetti’s staff getting valuable experience as talent developers, organizers and play callers. Players like Elijah Sarratt, Aiden Fisher, Ty Son Lawton, Kaelon Black and multiple others had seen plenty of high-level college football and brought their skills and experience to Bloomington.
Those guys all followed Cignetti, their leader, to Indiana. Other programs absolutely reached out and inquired, but they were locked in with Cignetti. That just doesn’t happen all the time.
Last, but certainly not least, Cignetti is doing all of that at I N D I A N A. The program that, up until this season, quite literally lost more college football games than anyone else, ever. The one that was paying its head coach $650k in 2010. The one treated as an afterthought by the powers that be for several decades.
This is all to say that it’s not like Indiana just hired a guy who wins and he kept doing that. He was a pretty unique individual who brought talent, coaching and playing, to Bloomington with him and got what seems to be universal buy-in from Indiana’s booster class. That just doesn’t happen.
So, sure, another program can go hire their big time winner, but they can’t recreate the history and circumstances that have allowed Cignetti to succeed in Bloomington. There is no “next Curt Cignetti” and there almost certainly never will be.
