MIAMI — Lil Uzi Vert turned up to Hard Rock Stadium in Indiana swag Monday night, and by the wee hours of Tuesday morning, Lil Wayne had on Twitter handed Curt Cignetti a new nickname.
“Bignetti,” if you’re wondering.
Indiana football entered a different layer of the cultural atmosphere this week, rising to national prominence through national championship in ways that stay with a program forever.
But anyone expecting Curt Cignetti to turn into anything else — to respond to this particular mountaintop with anything other than his trademark confidence and defiance — will have been setting themselves up for disappointment.
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At a first-thing-Tuesday news conference, seated next to the CFP national championship trophy that soon after would travel with him to Bloomington, Cignetti made it clear very little about him is about to change.
It’s the sport around him that had better be prepared to.
“People can cling to an old way of thinking,” he said, “categorizing teams as this or that, or conferences as this or that, or they can adjust to the new world.”
The moment was Cignetti, distilled. Perfunctory, pointed and serious. It was not quite six seconds a play, and each play has a life of its own, but anyone who has spent the last two years observing Indiana’s now-nationally famous coach will know he varnishes his opinion only when he chooses, and he is — to reach for another one of his maxims — unaffected by success or failure.
Cignetti’s demeanor captured the prevailing mood from the stage inside the third-floor JW Marriott Marquis ballroom Tuesday morning.
Even through tired eyes and weary voices, Hoosiers left and right did not waver in their explanations, or their expectations.
“We’ll continue to take it one day at a time,” Cignetti said. “One meeting a time, one practice at a time, and just keep improving and committing to the process, showing up prepared, trying to put it on the field and see where it takes us.”
There is another side to process. One unquantifiable, but nevertheless crucial: belief.
It comes before everything else. Commitment to winning, at any level, in any sport — in anything — is only worth your belief in the process that will get you there, and the investment that belief derives from you.
If Indiana is a reflection, as Cignetti is so fond of saying, of its habits and its attitudes, then it is a product of that belief. In Cignetti, in his plan, in one another.
In all of it.
“That belief is crucial,” Fernando Mendoza said Tuesday, “especially when the margins of college football are so small, as we’ve seen time and time again throughout the season.”
This is the achievement.
The winning, yes, but more so the journey. How matters more than what, because without the first, the second is exponentially more difficult.
Which reflects back on one of Cignetti’s core strengths: his ability to identify not just talented players, but the talent he needs in his players, and the reasons why some players fit that need better than others.
“We’re all like-minded individuals,” Notre Dame transfer center Pat Coogan said, “that have been recruited here by coach Cignetti and brought to this place for a common goal, and a common purpose.
“We’re all cut from the same cloth, and I think that showed on the field this year.”
It did, and that’s all that matters. Except to Cignetti.
If he departed briefly from his usual fare — a moment when the facade cracked ever so slightly — it was when he aired his one grievance. This year, he said, validated last year, when so much of the country tried to tear down what Indiana was building up.
That team did not climb as high as this one. But the success of 2025 proved the value and importance of 2024, something Cignetti would not leave the stage without reinforcing.
“The first team never got the national credit it was due,” Cignetti said, calling 2025 the second “chapter” in the book. “That team got it all started … but never really got its due. That was a special team.”
It got its due Tuesday morning, from the coach of a 16-0 national champion sitting beside the gleaming golden trophy that means nobody gets to argue with him anymore.
In this way — in all these ways — Cignetti is just relentlessly himself. It is reflected in his process, in his players and in his wins. In 15 years as a coach, he has 15 winning seasons. He’s worked at four distinct levels, and won at them all. He’s coached All-Americans and Heisman Trophy winners, and now a perfect national champion.
And what should encourage IU fans more than anything else, is that nothing will change. The creature of winning habit is too hardened and too successful in this life to start living a different one.
Cignetti will be in Houston on Wednesday for the presentation of the Bear Bryant Award. He’ll “see what the checklist looks like” when he gets back to his office on Thursday, but it will more or less resemble a sprint to the old Signing Day next month, then (in Cignetti’s words) time on “some nice, hot-weather island (for) about a week.”
“And then, when I come back,” he said, “I’ll figure out a few film projects that I think might fit next year’s team, and help me grow.”
Curt Cignetti is a national champion, and he’s not changing a thing. College football should adjust accordingly.
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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Curt Cignetti, a national champion, isn’t changing his ways, even with a nickname from Lil Wayne
Reporting by Zach Osterman, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
