Indiana football did the seemingly impossible last week, capping off a perfect 16-0 campaign with a 27-21 victory over the Miami Hurricanes in the National Championship at the end of its College Football Playoff run.
It’s the first time in over a century that a team football team has won 16 games with no losses, and Curt Cignetti is recruiting like he intends to do it again soon.
With the win, Indiana University now has the most recent undefeated teams in both football and men’s basketball, a team that’s
commemorated with a banner in Assembly Hall, dubbing the Hoosiers (somewhat unscientifically) the “NCAA’s #1 All-Time March Madness Team.”
The men’s basketball program, much like the football program looks set to do, capitalized on that success of Bob Knight’s first championship team at Indiana. Knight would win two more national championships, building the program into one of the sport’s blue bloods in his three decades as head coach.
The program has floundered since Knight’s firing over two decades ago. His immediate successor, Mike Davis, took a roster of former Knight recruits to the National Championship Game in 2002, but none of the coaches Indiana has had since have been able to make it past the Sweet 16.
Winning an NCAA Championship in football or basketball requires some luck, so looking at tournament success may be a slightly flawed metric. Tom Crean’s 2012-13 team, which earned a No. 1-seed, certainly had the talent to win a title, but an unfavorable draw in the Sweet 16 and a poor gameplan ended that season prematurely.
That Indiana hasn’t been able to replicate its success of Knight’s heyday is more than just bad luck, though, and can’t even be fully attributed to the various failures of the coaches who have come after him. It’s at the very least partially the product of unreasonable expectations and a lack of consensus as to how to return the program to glory.
In reading about Indiana’s fortuitous hiring of Cignetti, one major thing stands out: The decision and negotiations were primarily handled by Scott Dolson with Indiana providing financial backing and Cignetti outlining what kinds of infrastructure (read: money) would need to be in place to turn the program around.
While Indiana men’s basketball certainly has the money and resources that most programs dream about, the processes of hiring and firing head coaches has, historically, involved far more stakeholders who have different visions for the future of the program and different motivations for articulating those visions.
Mike Woodson was able to elevate the program from where it had been when he took over, leading Indiana to NCAA Tournament appearances in two of his first three seasons after a five-year drought from the last days of Crean and the entire tenure of Archie Miller.
Unfortunately, Woodson was not being evaluated against Archie Miller or the program he inherited. He was being evaluated against his legendary former coach and the three banners Knight hung during his time in Bloomington. A standard he himself claimed to strive for, no doubt knowing that’s how he was to be graded.
This isn’t to say that a program shouldn’t have standards or a defined vision to strive toward. Those things are normal for fans and administrators in charge of overseeing the programs. What is important, and has largely been missing for Indiana men’s basketball, is that those expectations be realistic.
Practically speaking, this means evaluating progress against recent history, not the program’s height.
So far, this courtesy has been extended to Cignetti and his staff. Articles from both local and national media, when attempting to quantify Indiana’s turnaround, point to the failures of 2021-2023.
Very few, if any, outlets have pointed out that Indiana’s 2019 and 2020 teams under Tom Allen that reached what was then historic heights with wins over Michigan and Penn State before a heartbreaking loss to Ole Miss in the Outback Bowl. If Instead, Indiana’s inability to sustain that success has been treated as more evidence that Cignetti has done the impossible with the football program.
Now that we know what is, in fact, possible for Indiana football, it’s important that we don’t make absolute perfection the standard.
I’m not exactly going out on a limb when I predict that Cignetti will lose another football game as Indiana’s head coach. He might even lose some big games.
When that happens, boos can’t reign down from the newly-filled student section at Memorial Stadium the way they have on all of Crean, Miller, Woodson and now Darian DeVries. It creates a pressure-cooker environment that is antithetical to coaches and players reaching their potential.
Though he’s not the first to do so, Malik Reneau recently opened up about how the lack of pressure at his new school, Miami, has allowed him to play some of the best basketball of his life. This is a message Indiana fans have heard before, but it’s always drowned out by those who insist that the program should function that way because of its prior successes.
Cignetti will only have his own past performances to compete with, which may alleviate some of the pressure basketball coaches have felt while trying to replace Knight. Regardless, fans cannot insert themselves into the equation by demanding a repeat of 2025.
Indiana may never win another Heisman Trophy, Rose Bowl, or National Title again. That is the reality of parity in the current NCAA landscape. Cignetti should be appreciated and evaluated in that context, with memories of this perfect season serving as just that: Memories of a year when everything went right. It shouldn’t be the new absolute standard.
In short: this is fun. We’re all having fun. Just have fun.
