Just two seasons ago, Indiana football was the punchline of the Big Ten. The losingest program in college football history, they said. One hundred twenty-five years without a ten-win season. Three bowl wins total. That was before Curt Cignetti showed up.
ESPN just released its annual ranking of every FBS head coach, and Cignetti sits at No. 1. Not Kirby Smart, who’s won two national titles at Georgia. Not Ryan Day, who just claimed a championship of his own at Ohio State. Cignetti. And according to ESPN’s Dave Wilson, there wasn’t much debate about it.
Half the voters in ESPN’s poll put Cignetti in the top spot. Wilson was one of them, and when asked if he hesitated to put Cignetti ahead of Smart, he didn’t.
“It takes a special coach to wrangle all the forces at a blue blood the way Kirby Smart has at Georgia while dominating the SEC,” Wilson wrote. “But we’ve never seen anything like what Curt Cignetti has done at Indiana, taking the losingest program in college football history to a national title in two years, after an 11-1 season at James Madison in 2023.”
That’s the part that’s hard to argue with. Cignetti took a roster that went 3-9 the year before he arrived and turned it into a national champion in two seasons. The Hoosiers went 27-2 over that stretch, including three postseason wins last year alone. The Big Ten has now won three straight national titles, and Indiana is the reason for one of them.
The numbers don’t lie
Before Cignetti, Indiana had won nine games exactly twice in 125 seasons: 1945 and 1967. The program had never hit double digits. In two years, Cignetti has more than tripled the school’s total bowl wins. Nine programs have won national titles this century. Indiana is one of them now.
ESPN’s Wilson put it this way: “If the definition of an elite coach is someone you’d trust to lead any program anywhere, he’s where you start.”
The Hoosiers open the 2026 season on September 5 against North Texas. The ceiling for this program doesn’t look like it has one anymore.
Leave a Comment