Inside Curt Cignetti's first 3 months as IU football coach: 'We totally redid the roster.'
BLOOMINGTON – As he passes three months in his new job, IU football coach Curt Cignetti’s North End Zone office remains relatively spartan.
The walls are largely barren. Couches left in their previous arrangement provide seating in front of his desk. A framed jersey from his hiring news conference waits to be hung on the wall. The whole room bears out aesthetically the focus Cignetti has given his new job, worrying first and most about details ranging from the transfer portal to the pregame sound system inside Memorial Stadium.
There’s one key request, however, Cignetti made immediately.
Every time Curt Cignetti’s taken a new head-coaching job, dating back to his first days at the first Indiana he coached — the one in Pennsylvania — he’s logged the same ask for his office. Even this time around, waste deep in the portal and facing, as he put it later, “20 days of 4th-and-1” trying to reassemble his roster, IU’s new coach still made sure he got one key request in:
A film projector, mounted to the ceiling and beamed onto the wall for Cignetti to watch from his desk.
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“I’m a film junkie. This thing’s on 98% of the time when I’m in the office,” Cignetti told IndyStar. “It’s the first thing, every time I take a job, that they have to install, because nobody ever has one, a big screen, an overhead (projector). There’s nothing I like better than watching offensive tape, trends and who’s doing a good job, opponents.”
Nebraska’s 2023 loss against Colorado was cued up and paused when Cignetti gestured to the image beamed out of the ceiling-mounted projector. This represents a comforting change of pace for Cignetti.
Across those whirlwind early days, his projector was reserved almost exclusively for cut-ups of Pro Football Focus tape — players he might want to retain, players he might want to recruit. Cignetti walked into a program with nearly an entire offensive starting 11 in the portal and a scholarship load dipping below 50 overall. Working from before dawn until after dark, he found some time for the work he enjoys most, but it was precious and fleeting.
“Recruiting, obviously, was paramount,” Cignetti said. “The transfer portal was the No. 1 priority, and it probably took up 90% of my time.”
Everything about the process that began with Tom Allen’s firing and ended once Cignetti sent his coaches away for a brief vacation after a quiet February signing window reflects the nature of modern college football.
Indiana dismissed Allen on a Sunday and had Cignetti confirmed by the end of the week. The following Friday, he convinced all-conference wide receiver Donaven McCulley to withdraw from the portal and return to Bloomington, while using the interval in between to assemble a coaching staff.
Six, Cignetti drew from his five successful years in charge at James Madison. Three were outside hires. The last, offensive line coach Bob Bostad, was a retention.
A head coach 13 years now — each of the 13 a winning season — Cignetti speaks like a coach in command of the details. He can still break down the start of his tenure day by day, the small wins in recruiting, retention and hiring that marked each one, and how they slowly unfolded as pieces of a larger, promising puzzle.
“The portal’s humming, man. It’s hot. Guys are in, and we’re evaluating those guys,” Cignetti said. “There was a lot that needed done to rebuild the roster. By the fourth day, you’re settled in, pretty much. Now it’s football. You’ve got the staff part of it taken care of for the most part. It’s all evaluation and recruiting and sales. We started to get a little momentum going around Day 5 or so, and it really just picked up.
“We totally redid the roster.”
In total, Cignetti and his staff wound up adding 38 players, the majority of them in the four-week window between his hiring and Christmas.
IU signed 22 players on offense, 14 on defense and two specialists. Five new running backs came in the door, as did five new wide receivers and three quarterbacks. Thirteen states and one country — Ohio QB transfer Kurtis Rourke, known playfully as The Maple Missile, is from Ontario, Canada — were represented.
Cignetti also managed to convince a handful of key players from last season’s team to remain in Bloomington, including McCulley, Carter Smith, Michael Katic and Trent Howland. And he scored key wins late in the 2024 signing cycle, none more so than four-star Center Grove QB Tyler Cherry.
Twenty days of 4th-and-1 paid off.
Cignetti dislikes the word “pleased.” He tries to keep it out of his vocabulary. But he’s willing to acknowledge it approached how he felt when the dust settled on a hectic first month.
“But I felt this on the day of the signing date,” he said, “and after the Christmas break: I think what we were able to do in the portal was really good, for where we were, and for what the history of the program was, and where we were from a roster standpoint when I got hired. That was excellent.”
Indiana sewed up its roster with a handful of transfers just after the new year. That meant the traditional signing date in February passed without any further additions, yet another sign of sea change in a sport Cignetti firmly believes is defined by it.
That allowed Cignetti time to do two things.
First, he spent the bulk of January when not in the football offices on the road.
Like so much else about his process, Cignetti orders recruiting according to distance: First, his home state, then anywhere within four hours, then five, then six, and then what he calls “distance areas.” He wanted in particular to show his face inside that four-hour arc. That meant Indianapolis, Chicago, Louisville, Cincinnati, Columbus, Fort Wayne, Dayton, St. Louis.
“January was kind of getting out in the state, meeting high school coaches,” he said. “A lot of recruiting evaluation took place, of (2025 prospects).”
What time Cignetti spent in the football facility — there were stretches when his players saw him in his office so regularly they were convinced he wasn’t going home — either sat him in front of that projector or in meetings with his assistants.
Cignetti brought four offensive staffers with him from James Madison, and two on defense.
He places great faith in Bryant Haines, five years now his defensive coordinator and a Broyles Award semifinalist in 2023, to manage that side of the ball. Cignetti hired Haines first as an assistant at Indiana (Pa.) after Haines’ stints as a graduate assistant at IU and Ohio State. He paid Haines $6,000 in his first job, and made him Indiana’s first-ever pre-bonus million-dollar coordinator this winter, the distance between those two salaries reflective of Cignetti’s belief in Haines.
“Bryant’s handling that end,” Cignetti said. “I have confidence in him. I don’t get too involved. During the season, maybe there’ll be a few things, but I pretty much let him go.”
Offensively, Cignetti brought a coordinator, a quarterbacks coach, a tight ends coach and a running backs coach with him from Harrisonburg. OC Mike Shanahan, like Haines, has been with Cignetti since the salaries he handed out were four figures. QBs coach Tino Sunseri joined up once Cignetti — an offensive coach at heart — turned play-calling duties over to Shanahan years ago. Grant Cain (tight ends) and John Miller (running backs) are going on years six and five, respectively, with Cignetti. Cignetti doesn’t run from familiarity.
His one new face in the offensive meeting room has the lion’s share of Cignetti’s attention. Bob Bostad, the longtime offensive line coach at Wisconsin who also did a turn in the NFL, was Cignetti’s lone retention from Tom Allen’s last staff. Cignetti’s line coach at JMU had been with him for the best part of a decade, but when he sat with Bostad, Cignetti found a coach whose resume and background appealed to him.
Now, the challenge is just getting everyone singing from the same hymn sheet.
“You’ve got four guys that know one offense, and then you’ve got a new line coach that’s got his certain way of doing things,” Cignetti said. “We’re kind of bringing that together, because the offense needs to be the offense that we have been successful with since I’ve been a head coach. It works.”
Cignetti is particularly focused on integrating Bostad. Offensive line coaches manage more positions across the field than any other assistant, and Cignetti knows it’s a short list of teams that have thrived without good work from that line or its coach.
“Up front, that’s always a critical unit,” Cignetti said. “I’ve always believed and people I respect believed if you have a good offensive line, you have a chance to be a good football team. We have a chance to have a pretty solid offensive line.”
That as much as anything kept Cignetti hands-on during those early meetings. But approaching spring practice, he’s begun to recognize a synergy between old coaches and new ones that’s allowed him to back away.
Ideally, by the time the season arrives, he’ll be involved but not in charge, all three phases steering themselves capably while he presides over it all.
Cignetti’s mind has therefore turned from the present to the future more lately. His first spring season all scheduled — with a spring game set for April 18, the Thursday before Little 500 weekend — Cignetti is already considering how he might tweak next year’s calendar to fit better around the obstacles thrown up by both spring break and Little 5.
And he expects a busier-than-usual portal window at the end of the spring semester.
Normally, far more activity takes place between fall and spring, after the season concludes and players can assess their long-term prospects. With a temporary restraining order preventing the NCAA from enforcing its one-time transfer exception, however, Cignetti expects more players to go looking for a new home a second time after spring practices conclude.
“The NCAA, I don’t expect, to change the rule back before spring ends, so these guys will have multiple transfer opportunities,” Cignetti said. “You’re going to see a little more movement at the end of spring, across the country, than you normally would.”
In modern college football, the calendar never slows. Cignetti put out fires for a living across the opening weeks of his tenure, but a coach who’s done this three times before recognizes familiar patterns beginning to emerge.
The comfort and confidence attendant to that have allowed him more time in the seat he prefers.
Cignetti lives for film breakdown. It’s where he evaluates his players and scouts his opponents. It’s also where he hunts for anything new — trends, formations, wrinkles, theories — that might evolve the way he thinks about the game to which he’s given his entire life.
More than once since his hiring, Cignetti, 63 in June, has described himself as a lifelong learner. Even after more than a dozen successful years as head coach, his greatest fear might be stagnation.
“I think any living organism has to adapt,” Cignetti said. “Time changes, the game changes, the rules change, so you’re always trying to refine the process and how you do things.”
Making it all the more important to hold tight to the familiar. To the coaches he trusts. To the process he’s refined. To a system that wins. To the projector hanging from the ceiling, and the remote control in his hand, always striving to move forward.
Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana football: How Curt Cignetti is rebuilding Hoosiers' roster
