THE INSIDE STORY OF THE BEST FOOTBALL SEASON IN INDIANA HISTORY
CULTURE SHOCK
the cover
COVER: Indiana’s Mike Katic (56) and the Hoosiers hoist the Old Oaken Bucket after defeating Purdue at Memorial Stadium on Nov. 30, 2024. RICH
Copyright © 2025 by IndyStar All Rights Reserved • ISBN: 978-1-63846-147-0
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This book is an unofficial account of the Indiana Hoosiers’ basketball season and is not endorsed by Indiana University or the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
FRONT
JANZARUK / THE HERALD-TIMES
Credits
Photography
David Banks, William Bretzger, Matt Cashore, Gary Cosby Jr., Frank Fortune, Bobby Goddin, Rich Janzaruk, Nick King, Kirby Lee, Samantha Madar, Joseph Maiorana, Jacob Musselman, Matthew OHaren, Ben Queen, Kyle Robertson, Trevor Ruszkowski, Christine Tannous, Gary A. Vasquez, David Yeazell, Dale Young
Stories
Gregg Doyel, IndyStar
Dana Hunsinger Benbow, IndyStar
Michael Niziolek, The Herald-Times
Zach Osterman, IndyStar
LEFT: Indiana Hoosiers helmets before the game against the Michigan Wolverines at Memorial Stadium on Nov. 9, 2024, in Bloomington, Ind. TREVOR RUSZKOWSKI / IMAGN IMAGES
PRESEASON
Indiana has most losses in history, just hired Curt Cignetti, who has zero losing seasons.
ZACH OSTERMAN, INDIANAPOLIS STAR • PUBLISHED NOV. 30, 2023
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Scott Dolson delivered everything he set out to when he began searching for Tom Allen’s replacement, and then just a little bit more. From its beginning Sunday morning, Dolson wanted a fast, efficient search. His aim was to have it concluded within the week, a box he ticked just as cleanly as his ability to keep information as close to the vest as is ever possible during this process.
Indiana sat with well-regarded assistants, sitting head coaches and ones out of the game but with a track record of success. Dolson focused on the final two profiles in particular, valuing head-coaching experience.
He got it in Curt Cignetti, who comes to Indiana with 13 seasons running his own programs. Across that baker’s dozen, Cignetti’s bonafides at the lower levels of the sport are well established.
Everything about Cignetti’s profile fit Dolson’s criteria, with a little extra thrown in. The only level Cignetti has yet to thrive is in a Power Four job. Now he gets that chance, stepping into a school desperate for success, and willing to match Cignetti’s own ambition.
A quarterback at West Virginia, first for his father, Frank, and then for Don Nehlen, Cignetti’s assistant-coaching stops included Davidson, Rice, Temple, Pitt, North Carolina State and Alabama. He coached quarterbacks pretty much everywhere until he landed in Tuscaloosa, where he worked with Julio Jones, among others, and helped Nick Saban win his first national championship with the Crimson Tide.
From there he got his first head job, at Indiana (Pa.), where his father, Frank, went 182-50-1 across 20 seasons. Curt Cignetti never had a losing season in
Indiana, across six in charge.
In fact, he’s never had a losing season anywhere.
From Indiana, Cignetti moved to Elon, where he posted back-to-back FCS playoff appearances in one of that level’s toughest jobs. In Cignetti’s second season leading the Phoenix, they upset the No. 2 team in the country on the road, so that offseason that team hired him.
Across three FCS seasons at James Madison, Cignetti advanced at least as far as the national semifinal three times. Then, he guided the Dukes through an FBS transition that’s seen them win 19 games across the past two years, finish first or tied for first in the Sun Belt twice in as many tries, and break the Top 25 this fall.
The final math on that: 13 seasons as a head coach, and 13 winning seasons as a head coach.
OPPOSITE: James Madison head coach Curt Cignetti walks the sideline during a game against the Appalachian State Mountaineers at Kidd Brewer Stadium in Boone, N.C., on Sept. 24, 2022. DAVID YEAZELL / IMAGN IMAGES
IU football is fun again under new coach Curt Cignetti.
And has it ever been this cool?
GREGG DOYEL, INDIANAPOLIS STAR • PUBLISHED AUG. 31, 2024
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 cool. 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 OPPOSITE: Indiana’s Aiden Fisher touches The Rock on his way into Memorial Stadium during The Walk before the start of the Indiana versus Florida International football game at Memorial Stadium on Aug. 31, 2024. RICH JANZARUK / THE HERALD-TIMES
IU football’s win over human nature another step forward under Curt Cignetti
ZACH OSTERMAN, INDIANAPOLIS STAR • PUBLISHED SEPT. 7, 2024
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Curt Cignetti
didn’t waste words this week, describing Friday’s visit from Western Illinois during his radio call-in show as a battle against human nature.
The Leathernecks had lost 25 games in a row and were about to make it 26. In some sportsbooks, the line — stretching past 42 points in Indiana’s favor — was the largest anyone could find in modern program history. The implication: IU had no business struggling here.
The only way Indiana could exceed expectations in the most winnable game a too-often losing program has faced in years was to do exactly what the Hoosiers did. For that, they earned their coach’s praise, which is rarely given lightly.
“It was a good night,” Cignetti said. “I was pleased that our team played with an edge and an attitude, at a high standard. The (starters), I’m talking about. They
didn’t play down to the competition.”
Friday’s 77-3 victory set a new program record for points, as well as one for total yards (701). Only once, in 1901, have the Hoosiers won a game by a wider margin. The only drive in Indiana’s first 10 that didn’t finish in the end zone was the last of the first half, when the Hoosiers (2-0) deliberately bled out the clock.
This was the game IU bought out of its three-year series with Louisville to add, and the Hoosiers got everything they wanted from it: a comfortable home win, a step closer to a bowl berth and a final tune-up before next weekend’s trip to UCLA, perhaps one of the most important games of the season.
Impressive as it was — three quarterbacks combined for 378 yards and three scores, six Hoosiers rushed for a touchdown, IU logged six sacks and returned an interception for a score — there won’t
be much the wider sport takes from Friday night, other than the final score.
But a head coach hellbent on teaching his players the value of confidence, of clean football, of consistent, successful execution, will see this as a valuable day’s work.
Momentum and belief aren’t everything but they go a long way in college football. A program that’s won just three Big Ten games in the past three seasons needs some juice, and since day one, Cignetti’s been pumping it in as hard as he can.
It will perhaps have been even more encouraging to Cignetti that this performance came on the back of a positive week. Tuesday’s practice, he said, wasn’t up to par, and he let the team know that when it ended. From there, he said, the Hoosiers built ever upward, leading into a record-setting Friday night.
After the imperfections of the Week 1
OPPOSITE: The final score up on the scoreboard after the Indiana routs Western Illinois football 77-3 at Memorial Stadium on Sept. 6, 2024. RICH JANZARUK / THE HERALD-TIMES
RIGHT: Indiana Hoosiers wide receiver Elijah Sarratt (13) runs the ball for a touchdown in the first quarter against the Western Illinois Leathernecks at Memorial Stadium on Sept. 6, 2024.
TREVOR RUSZKOWSKI / IMAGN IMAGES
OPPOSITE: Indiana Hoosiers running back Justice Ellison (6) runs the ball while Western Illinois Leathernecks linebacker Ryan Crandall (13) defends in the first quarter at Memorial Stadium on Sept. 6, 2024.
TREVOR RUSZKOWSKI / IMAGN IMAGES
win against Florida International (and, apparently, a bit of a wake-up call in practice), Indiana’s coach got what he asked for.
Sept. 6, 2024
“We threw and caught the ball well, protected well. We wanted to clean those penalties up, protect better than we did last week,” he said. “I thought every day built on the last. Tuesday wasn’t a great day. Talked to the team afterward about it. I don’t talk to the team after every practice, most of them I do, but I had some things to say, and I had a captive audience.
“They went out and applied it.”
After the game, players made available to the media spoke about wanting more,
describing the war against complacency as never-ending.
Mikail Kamara (two sacks, one QB hit) suggested even allowing a field goal fell short of expectation. Elijah Sarratt, who turned in his first 100-yard receiving game as a Hoosier and grabbed his first touchdown in cream and crimson, talked like a man familiar with this kind of winning from his season with Cignetti at James Madison.
Both players, in fact, played for Cignetti at JMU. Both were a part of that culture and the success it fostered in Harrisonburg, and both followed Cignetti
to Bloomington believing he could do the same thing here.
Perhaps there was no greater endorsement of the value of Friday’s game than two players familiar with their head coach’s methods, both willingly celebrating the positives of Friday night’s win but both suggesting firmly that this is by no means the end.
There will be greater tests to come, starting in just eight days, and the Hoosiers believe they’re ready. That for Cignetti should qualify as meaningful progress, which should have been more than enough to take from this night.
Lee Corso, 1979 Holiday Bowl GameDay reunion ‘means the world’ to IU’s first bowl winners
ZACH OSTERMAN, INDIANAPOLIS STAR • PUBLISHED OCT. 26, 2024
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — This weekend’s visit from ESPN College GameDay took on special meaning for all involved Saturday — it meant IU’s 1979 Holiday Bowl team could celebrate with its beloved coach.
Lee Corso led those Hoosiers to the program’s first-ever bowl win, a dramatic victory over previously undefeated BYU, in the Holiday Bowl 45 years ago. That team had already planned its reunion months in advance for this weekend.
When GameDay, on which Corso has been a staple since its inception, announced last week it planned to make its first-ever Saturday stop in Bloomington, that made the date serendipitous.
“The Holiday Bowl team was very closeknit. We were a family in the truest sense,” said Terry Tallen, one of the captains of that team. “(Having Corso join the reunion) means the world to us.”
That team honored its coach and its anniversary with multiple events this weekend, including a dinner Friday, during which Corso worked a room stuffed with 75 or so former players, assistants, trainers, support staff and more.
And perhaps the most memorable moment of the weekend came in the build-up to College GameDay, when Corso rode onto the set — erected on the south lawn of Memorial Stadium — on a double-decker bus with his team.
The moment was a nod to Corso’s first game as Indiana head coach, when he promised fans a special warm-up then had his team stretch and prepare on its practice field, before riding from that field into Memorial Stadium on a double-decker bus. Corso even wore the iconic red sweater he often sported on the IU sideline during his 10-year tenure.
“To me, the thing that means the most, to be quite honest with you, is the fact that we get to see him in person,” said Mark Deal, who was a graduate assistant for Corso and is now an assistant athletic director at IU. “I’m thrilled GameDay’s here. I’m thrilled we’re 7-0. But the chance to be with coach again? You gotta be kidding me.”
This year’s reunion, the first official get-together since the team’s 40th in 2019, was tinged with sadness at the news of Tim Clifford’s passing last week. Clifford quarterbacked that team, winning the Chicago Tribune Silver Football as Big Ten MVP, before eventually being drafted into the NFL by the Bears.
Teammates plan to bring Clifford’s No. 14 jersey with them onto the field when they are honored between the first and second quarters of Saturday’s game against Washington.
OPPOSITE: ESPN College GameDay host and former Indianapolis Colts punter Pat McAfee takes his shirt off for the camera during the second quarter of a game between the Washington Huskies and Indiana Hoosiers at Memorial Stadium on Oct. 26, 2024.
JACOB MUSSELMAN / IMAGN IMAGES
These past two weeks deliver message loud and clear for IU: Football can work here
ZACH OSTERMAN, INDIANAPOLIS STAR • PUBLISHED OCT. 27, 2024
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — As Indiana football’s surprise season has climbed further and further beyond virtually anyone’s expectations week on week, it has fostered an evolving companion conversation.
With each first in program history, each not-since-when, each win, has come the question: What constitutes success for Indiana in 2024?
The answer: In the most fundamental and important way, the Hoosiers realized it this weekend.
Before the season, a bowl berth would probably have sufficed, whatever Curt Cignetti’s own attitudes toward that. A winning season certainly would’ve seemed like a boon. Threatening the program record for wins in a single season (9) seemed like dreamland.
Now, some of these are guaranteed and others seem like minimum requirements. At 8-0, frankly, if the Hoosiers do not at
least get to 10 wins, it will probably feel like a disappointment.
But seasons live and die one at a time. Conquering the world last year doesn’t grant you unlimited currency this year.
Ask Mike Norvell. There has to be more to success than your record, because records reset, and success can be fleeting.
What made this weekend — and more widely the past two weeks — successful transcends that. The past 14 days have provided affirming evidence Indiana has been chasing for decades: Football can work here.
The sold-out crowds. The student campouts. The raucous GameDay crowd. The wins.
Two weeks ago, football royalty showed up in Bloomington with Fox Big Noon Kickoff training a white-hot spotlight on 6-0 Indiana. It was homecoming and Nebraska was a bit of a Big Ten darling, the program patiently cooking what
Cignetti was trying to microwave overnight. The stage was set for distraction and deflation, and instead IU buried the Cornhuskers and nearly all remaining doubters with them.
That brought ESPN GameDay to town. Even longtime host Rece Davis said the show’s one previous visit to Bloomington — for a Thursday night season opener in 2017 — came with “a big asterisk.” This was the real thing.
The guest picker. The enormous set. Students showing up in their thousands. Lee Corso in his famous old sweater and Nick Saban picking the Hoosiers and Pat McAfee banging the drum for his adopted home state.
Teams lose this game a lot. James Madison did last year, when GameDay set up shop in Harrisonburg and Appalachian State stole the spotlight for what turned out to be the Dukes’ only regular-season loss.
OPPOSITE: Indiana Hoosiers wide receiver Omar Cooper Jr. (3) celebrates scoring a touchdown during the second quarter against the Washington Huskies at Memorial Stadium on Oct. 26, 2024. JACOB MUSSELMAN / JACOB MUSSELMAN-IMAGN IMAGES
OPPOSITE: The Indiana Hoosiers celebrate in front of the student section after the Indiana versus Washington game in Bloomington on Oct. 26, 2024. RICH
Not here. On a chamber-of-commerce afternoon in Bloomington, in front of the best crowd Memorial Stadium has hosted in years, without their starting quarterback, the Hoosiers simply pounded their way past a lesser Big Ten team, their eighth win in as many tries matching the program record for best start to a season.
“It’s real easy for your team to kind of lose their focus on what they’re there for. I’ve just seen it happen over and over and over,” Cignetti said postgame. “We overcame it, and we won, so it was a good day.”
A good day that should reverberate for this program long into the future. Football can work here.
• A robust NIL setup — not the best in the country, just adequately funded and responsibly managed — and smart scouting in the portal can build a winning team.
• One of the country’s largest living
alumni bases can fill its stadium, and make it an imposing, exciting place to play.
• One of the Big Ten’s most picturesque college towns can host ESPN GameDay and deliver the kind of energy and enthusiasm that make college football Saturdays special.
Indiana has hosted ESPN’s basketball version of GameDay before. This weekend was testament to the difference in scale.
Everything is bigger with football, more magnified, more colorful, more intense.
And, if you can win, more remarkable. The town, the university, the athletic department and the program all got the chance to prove they were ready to be serious about the sport they’ve been trying to power up around here for generations, and they delivered.
An inevitable byproduct of Cignetti’s immediate success these past two months
has been the attendant discussion of whether IU can keep him, if bigger programs come calling. Athletic Director Scott Dolson and university President Pam Whitten have both long been committed to elevating the sport here, and they’re already trying to position everything they can to make sure the winner they have at head football coach stays where he is.
But what they experienced this weekend should outlast Cignetti’s tenure, no matter its length.
This weekend proved football can work at Indiana. High-level, supported, successful football, with all the right pieces in all the right places. There should be no more accepting mediocrity in the sport at Indiana University, because Indiana University has proven it can do better. One look around on Saturday provided all the proof you’d need.
RIGHT: Indiana fans wave Cignetti themed towels during the Indiana versus Washington football game at Memorial Stadium on Oct. 26, 2024.
RICH JANZARUK / THE HERALD-TIMES
JANZARUK / THE HERALD-TIMES
COLLEGE
FOOTBALL PLAYOFF
IU football crashed
the CFP party — and shouldn’t have to apologize for any of it.
ZACH OSTERMAN, INDIANAPOLIS STAR • PUBLISHED DEC. 21, 2024
SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Never shy of a line, Curt Cignetti dropped one more Friday as he sat down to his final postgame news conference of the season.
“It’s hard to say goodbye to your kids,” Cignetti deadpanned, “because they just watched their dad get his ass kicked.”
This was Indiana’s brash, Spurrierlike head coach acting as a lightning rod for so much of what went wrong in the No. 8 Hoosiers’ 27-17 season-ending College Football Playoff first-round loss at No. 5 Notre Dame on Friday night.
The sheer tonnage of confusion that would have met that sentence four months ago is rivaled only by the potential impact of this remarkable season on the trajectory of an IU football program desperately fighting to escape its ugly past. Whenever the dust settles on this frustrating end to an exhilarating fall, there will be plenty of time to pass around credit for a season
that rises head and shoulders above the other 125 in program history.
For the time being, the Hoosiers (11-2) and their fans will have to lick their wounds and take their lumps, from a barking mob of college football fans sprinting to the nearest social media microphone to tell them why they didn’t belong here in the first place.
Listen to none of it.
If IU football takes nothing else from Friday night, let it be this: Don’t for one moment lose the steely confidence that set the stage for this most unexpected of seasons. Apologize for nothing. That’s Indiana football’s identity now. Embracing it will win you games.
College football will want the Hoosiers to atone for Friday night. For Kurtis Rourke’s modest performance in what mostly qualified as an offensive no-show. For the lack of a productive pass rush on
a night when IU needed to make Riley Leonard uncomfortable.
For deigning in the first place to take up space in a Playoff field that should have just been turned over to a bunch of threeloss SEC teams that never lost any of the hypothetical matchups this game could have been if the committee had just been willing to overlook all the times those teams fell flat on their face in the games that actually counted.
Pay no mind to SEC fans speaking in bad faith about everyone else’s program. It’s not to Columbia or College Station or Oxford that Indiana should look tonight.
The Hoosiers earned what they accomplished this season, up to and including their place in the inaugural 12-team Playoff field.
“You are what your record says you are,” Cignetti said. “So, 11-2. Tied for second in the Big Ten. Made the College Football
OPPOSITE: Indiana Hoosiers players enter the field for warm ups before a game between the Indiana Hoosiers and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish in the first round of the College Football Playoff on Dec. 20, 2024, in South Bend, Ind. CHRISTINE TANNOUS / INDYSTAR