The Courier-Journal (Louisville)
IU football is cool thanks to fiery perfectionist coach
The IU student section is full for kickoff of the Curt Cignetti era, the kids wearing T-shirts with a makeshift Marlboro cigarette logo, and somewhere in America, somebody is no doubt missing the point and getting angry. Not you, of course. You're here in Indiana, and you understand what is happening with this IU football program.
IU football is fun again. More than fun, the Hoosiers are How long has it been since they were fun? Have they ever been cool? They are now, with Curt Cignetti stalking the sidelines, seething and angry even as his team is pounding FIU into submission — final score: IU 31, FIU 7 — because the Hoosiers aren't doing it perfectly.
Cignetti's a perfectionist, demanding that not just of his team, but himself. He's up every day at 4 a.m., into the office by 5 and home after the sun goes down, and it goes down late in Bloomington. Then back up the next day. Cignetti pushes himself hard, and pushes his team hard, wanting everyone involved here — players, coaches, himself — to back up all his big talk.
Hey, this is how Cignetti motivates himself and his teams, and it works. You saw what he did the past five years at James Madison, right? He did something similar from 2011-16 at the other Indiana University, the one in Pennsylvania — can't make this stuff up — so he has a method he follows, and part of that method is firing up the folks around him. When ESPN brought its “College GameDay” show to James Madison last season, a record crowd of 26,000 showed up at the leafy campus area called the Quad. Not a record for the Quad.
A record for “College GameDay.”
Tom Allen, Curt Cignetti: Not alike
Football is not a game for the faint of heart, and that includes the fan base. And at IU, no offense intended, the fan base hasn't exactly been lionhearted. Much of that behavior is learned from previous seasons, and reinforced by future seasons, and pretty soon you have a self-fulfilling cycle of loss and meh, with
Bill Lynch and Kevin Wilson and Tom Allen trying and failing to get this fan base fired up.
Cignetti isn't failing, and a result like this — 31-7 against FIU — doesn't hurt. Is FIU a good team? No. But the Hoosiers treated FIU as such, jumping it for an early 21-0 lead and then fiddling with their food until it was time to be done with childish things. IU running back Elijah Green unleashed a biblical touchdown run of 51 yards, and that was that.
We saw an IU football team gain 414 yards of offense and allow just 182 yards on defense. We saw IU go 4-for-4 in the red zone, taking touchdowns over field goals, and committing zero turnovers.
We didn't quite see the perfect game, which is why Cignetti was steaming on the sideline. At James Madison, his teams were generally among the least penalized in the country. His first IU team failed in its first game in that area, with nine penalties for 80 yards. And Cignetti was just getting angrier and angrier on the sideline, as the margin grew and the penalty tally grew and pretty soon he's walking 10 yards away from everyone else, then 15, then 20, then 25, because he's so mad he wants to erupt.
Cignetti had a mini-eruption with Big Ten sideline reporter Shane Sparks going into halftime, telling Sparks he “didn't like the last seven minutes of that quarter. Sloppy, even on the third touchdown drive on offense.”
This is how IU football comes back, you know. With a coach who pursues perfection, not just winning, which is why IU football feels different today than it has felt since, I don't know … since John Pont was reaching the Rose Bowl in 1967? The Hoosiers haven't won much since then, topping out in 2020 when Tom Allen's team went 6-2 in the Covid-shortened season, reached the top 10, played in the Outback Bowl, and made Saturday afternoon feel like Friday night.
Please, no offense to Tom Allen. His way worked, until it didn't — losing offensive coordinator Kalen DeBoer and quarterback Michael Penix Jr. had something to do with that — and his way was to treat every play like THE MOST BIGGEST BEST THING EVER! It worked, but it never felt sustainable, or even real. It felt … weird.
Cignetti doesn't do weird. He does cool, and this fan base is picking up on it, which is why the crowd was in Memorial Stadium, not still drinking beer in the parking lot like usual, for kickoff. Whoever made those Marlboro shirts made an error — yeah, I'm calling it an error — of exuberance. Look, cigarettes aren't cool. And the irony is, the cool kids on campus these days don't even smoke cigs. They vape! Ha!
About those Cignetti/Marlboro T-shirts
But Cignetti's nickname is Cig, and … you get the idea. Someone plastered the crimson Marlboro logo on a cream Tshirt, replacing the word MARLBORO under that logo with the word CIGNETTI. If we could just not take ourselves so seriously, we'd see that as a clever way to get some excitement going for IU football.
But alas, because all we do is take ourselves seriously, expect those T-shirts to go away.
Don't expect the Hoosiers to go away. They have an offensive line that was carving enormous holes into the FIU defensive front, and in James Madison transfer Ty Son Lawton, Justice Ellison (Wake Forest) and the aforementioned Green (UNC), they have running backs who can hit the hole before it closes before making the nearest tackler miss. They have a quarterback in Ohio transfer Kurtis Rourke with nearly 8,000 career passing yards, and a receiving corps with playmakers from Lawrence North (2023 star Donaven McCulley, Saturday standout Omar Cooper), not to mention the transfer portal.
And they have plays like the following two that will keep fans coming back for more:
Rourke dropping back, finding himself alone with an FIU defensive tackle, ducking under the guy, breaking into the open field and spotting former Ohio teammate Miles Cross down the field. Rourke is waving Cross further down the field then flinging a pass inches before he crosses the line of scrimmage. Thirty yards away, Cross makes a leaping, one-handed catch. The Marlboro men (and women) erupt.
Rourke faking a handoff up the middle, dropping back for a pass, then casually tossing the football over his shoulder — like a good-luck pinch of salt — where Myles Price grabs it for a 12-yard end around.
This is cool stuff, like the IU football team floating onto the field pregame to the sound of AC/DC's "Thunderstruck", like the student section being full, like the entire place being almost full (announced crowd: 44,150) and like the head coach stalking the sideline, not giddy like a child but furious like an adult — one who demands perfection, and doesn't think close is close enough.