Indiana's Curt Cignetti is AllSportsPeople College Football Coach of the Year — again

There has been so much to celebrate inside the Indiana football program these last few weeks, and all of it new to the Hoosiers and the growing legions who follow them: an undefeated season, a Big Ten Championship game victory, a win over the team with the No. 1 poll ranking, the top seed in the College Football Playoff, a Heisman Trophy. It would be so easy to bathe in the confetti, grab a beverage and walk around campus with a smile so constant it begins to ache.

This, of course, would be counterproductive relative to the challenge that remains in the CFP. And it’s impossible for the Hoosiers because of the one item of football accomplishment that is not new to IU.

Curt Cignetti is AllSportsPeople College Football Coach of the Year.

Again.

“He never preaches that we have to be ready to win the Big Ten championship Feb. 2, or spring ball in April. He preaches that each day, you’re either getting better or getting worse,” linebacker Isaiah Jones told SN. “And for us, it’s each day you have to get better.

“Even in the summer, he’s like, ‘We won’t be ready to win a game July 15. But come the first game, I will have you guys ready to win the game, and each week we’ll get better and better and better.’ Each day has to be a step toward being the team you want to be and the defense we want to be, and the coaches do a really good job with that. They’re never going to let you take a day off, take a position drill off, take a play off.”

MORE: AllSportsPeople 2025 College Football All-America team

Curt Cignetti wins SN's Coach of the Year

The history of SN’s Coach of the Year award is a long one, first honoring Darrell Royal of Texas in 1963, as the Longhorns finished 11-0 and defeated Roger Staubach’s Navy squad in the Cotton Bowl. In the 60 times it has been presented since, legends from Ara Parseghian to Woody Hayes, from Bo Schembechler to Don James and from Nick Saban to Bill Snyder have won it. A few have done it twice, including Royal and Dennis Erickson.

In all that time, no one's ever done it two years in a row.

Recent SN Coaches of the Year

Because, let's be honest about this, there is more subjectivity in a Coach of the Year honor than in any other sporting trophy. And so the presenters have some latitude to spread around the joy. In that sense, the only justification for presenting the award to the same person in consecutive years is there can be no other answer.

Curt Cignetti, 2024: excavates Indiana from the worst history of any Power 4 team to an 11-0 start and College Football Playoff selection. Wow, who else could it be?

Curt Cignetti, 2025: leads Indiana to perfect 13-0 record that includes a road victory at No. 5 Oregon and neutral-field upset of No. 1 Ohio State, which conveys a Big Ten championship and No. 1 seed in the College Football Playoff. I mean, seriously, how do we not?

In advance of this season, Indiana was challenged to replace quarterback Kurtis Rourke after his one year on campus and returned only eight starters from the 2024 team, including wide receiver Elijah Sarratt. His receiving partner, Omar Cooper Jr., had played enough that transfer QB Fernando Mendoza at least could count on reliable targets, and there were three veteran O-lineman in front of him. With considerable additions, that group came to rank No. 4 in scoring offense and No. 8 in total offense. Mendoza went from obscure starter with the Cal Bears – I saw him put up just 15 points in a road game at Pitt in 2024 – to IU's first Heisman Trophy winner.

On the defensive side were just four returning starters, and yet somehow this unit finished No. 2 in the nation in scoring defense and No. 6 in total defense and held gifted QBs Luke Altmyer (Illinois), Dante Moore (Oregon) and Julian Sayin (Ohio State) to a combined 40 points, just three scoring passes with three interceptions and an average of 197 yards.

"It's remarkable, to say the least. He has done more for this program in two years' time than anybody in the history of Indiana football," Don Fischer, the broadcast voice of the Hoosiers, told SN. "To do what he's done is stunning to Hoosier nation and pretty much to the college football world.

"He's an old-school coach in some respects, and yet as modern as anyone in this business because of how he's adapted. I just don't know that I've ever seen anything like it... I know I haven't. And I haven't heard of anything like this in the past."

MORE: Vanderbilt's Diego Pavia wins SN Player of the Year

Not repeating history, but writing a new chapter

When Cignetti won this award in 2024, we told you about Indiana's inglorious football history, that he'd taken the school with the worst winning percentage of any Power 4 program and rung up an 11-1 regular season that included victories over the two teams, Washington and Michigan, that had played for the national title the previous season. In his first season as a Big Ten head coach, he'd transformed the Hoosiers into a force at that level.

It seemed like a feel-good story at the time, but what was simmering through the highly exclusionary college football world was a sense IU didn't belong in the CFP, certainly not at the expense of an Alabama squad that had the proper gravitas (and two more regular-season losses, but did we mention this was Alabama?) Those who opposed the Hoosiers' inclusion expressed profound joy in their struggle on the home field of established college football royalty, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.

"The way the season ended did leave a bitter taste, and all the backlash we got. So that was something you remembered," Cignetti told SN. "But I don't think you ever arrive in this game. That's just not the nature of the game. It's too competitive, and the margin of victory is too slim."

Losing in a dreadful November 2024 performance at Ohio State by 23 points, and then falling hard in that road playoff opener to Notre Dame by 10 only amplified those who had doubted Indiana's legitimacy. The Indiana players were well aware, and maybe were made more aware as they encountered the Buckeyes on their conference's grandest stage earlier this month, in the Big Ten Championship game at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.

"For us, the Big Ten Championship game was personal for a lot of guys on the team – every guy that was on the team last year and then went into Columbus and lost," Jones told SN. "It felt like we were meant to be here, and this was going to be our chance to get our get-back and to get our revenge. In the week leading up to it, I don't know if I've ever seen a more focused team."

It was like that a lot in Bloomington this autumn. In September, there was the Big Ten opener against Illinois, which carried in a top-10 poll ranking for the prime-time, nationally televised showdown and carried out the scars of a 53-point defeat.

"This team met every challenge, and the big one, really, was Illinois," Cignetti said. "It was getting a lot of hype. They were No. 9 in the country. Nobody was picking us. But we were kind of lurking in the weeds the whole offseason, and we polished them off 63-10 at home."

From there were impressive road wins at Iowa and Oregon, the latter ranked No. 2 in the polls when the Hoosiers arrived. The Ducks' only second-half touchdown came on a surprising Mendoza pick-6, with Indiana's defense hitting fiercely and holding them to 64 yards on 27 plays.

Indiana suddenly was known as more than just a place where Cignetti and his staff worked miracles with transfer quarterbacks.

"Every week, it's the same preparation, if we're playing the No. 1 team or it's the opening week and we're playing an FCS team," Jones said. "But for us, that Oregon game, we felt on defense like things were clicking. I don't know if we had a lot of missed assignments across the board; guys were in the spots they needed to be in.

"Not only that, but guys were making plays. You draw it up on a white board and a guy is in position to make a play, but you're only as good as the players you have and if they make those plays. From the D-line to the linebackers to the safeties and corners, everyone was making the plays that needed to be made. It's like a fire you just keep pouring gasoline on. One guy makes a play, then the next guy, then you make a play. After that, it becomes smothering for an offense."

"And the Big Ten matchup with Ohio State was, I think, a heavyweight slugfest. And we proved we could win in that kind of venue, that kind of game. You're always looking to improve, and I think this team has proven itself up to this point."

MORE: Bill Bender's expert bracket for College Football Playoff

How Curt Cignetti came to be a phenomenon

Perhaps Cignetti needed to remain undervalued for much of his career in order to reach this level of virtuosity when he at last was granted the opportunity to work as a head coach in a major conference.

He had plenty of extraordinary mentors as he constructed his career, starting with his father, Frank, so great at the Division II level at IUP he was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame.

He played three years under another Hall of Famer, Don Nehlen, at West Virginia. He worked for Johnny Majors at Pitt – albeit not when Tony Dorsett was helping Majors win the national title, but his second stint – and was asked to stick around when Walt Harris took over. He later got the chance to learn for five seasons under Nick Saban.

He worked all those years in the game and was pushing 50 before he got his first real chance to be a college head coach, at IUP.

The lessons he learned through all that time as an assistant, and the drive that comes from being underestimated and overlooked for so long are evident in the avalanche of victories since. He has coached from DII to FCS to Group of 5 to Power 4 and won just short of 80 percent of the games contested at all these levels.

He was pretty much just a guy who'd had two double-digit win seasons at James Madison when Indiana hired him, and there was no apparent reason for any IU booster or fan or disinterested alum or Hoosiers basketball fan to believe anything would significantly change in the football program.

Then he issued that quote at his introductory press conference: "I win. Google me." Then was introduced to the crowd at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall during an early TV timeout of basketball game against Maryland and declared, "I've never taken a backseat to anybody and don't plan on starting now. Purdue sucks! And so does Michigan and Ohio State!"

Fischer was on the call for the basketball game that night. The IU radio network did not go to break, instead feeding the public address system audio through their board so all listening on their radios, phones or computers could hear what Cignetti said. Fischer was intrigued enough by what he observed that he wound up attending nearly every spring practice in advance of the 2024 season and became convinced things really could change.

"I was totally enthralled with what he did, how he conducted practice, how he inputted what he wanted to say," Fischer told SN. "He told me in two different interviews leading up to spring that year – he said, 'Look, I go about this a little bit differently than some. I make up a practice plan for our assistant coaches, go in at 4:30, 5 o'clock in the morning and make up a practice plan for each one of them.'

"His practices are very concise, everything's moving the whole practice session, everything's bang-bang-bang. I realized how organized he was, how he would stand on the sideline and watch different things in different sessions, what was going on in this location or this position group. He would input, and then he'd go back to the sideline and watch until he saw the next thing he wanted to change or influence in some way. He wasn't invasive. It wasn't like he was trying to run the entire practice. He was letting his coaches coach.

"I told anybody that would listen: This guy is going to do it here at Indiana. He's going to become a winner."

Back home again? No, home now is Indiana

Born in Pittsburgh, Cignetti has spent roughly half his life either in Pennsylvania or just over the border in West Virginia. So when Penn State fired James Franklin a little more than a month into the season, Cignetti became the most popular candidate for college football analysts and reporters to cite as a candidate to coach the Nittany Lions.

Cignetti was not chosen as our Coach of the Year because he almost immediately accepted a contract extension from IU and detonated any further discussion of that subject, but that decision kept everyone involved with the Hoosiers focused on the available goals: the Big Ten title game, the CFP. Can you imagine the circus if IU had visited Penn State in early November with Cignetti still a potential candidate?

The embrace of his situation at IU certainly is not the norm in a sport populated by the likes of Lane Kiffin.

"You kind of go through that a little bit every year, when you're winning," Cignetti told SN. "I went through it last year, too. You see your name out there, and you start to play that game in your head: Would I go here? Would I go there? And same as last year, really: Everything that I need is here. We really love the town, love the people, my wife's got good friends. My kids fly in for the games; they love the area. I love who I'm working for: the president and the AD. We play in a great league. I just couldn't see going anywhere."

If it seems Cignetti might have leveraged any potential Penn State interest to gain an improved contract, it actually was the IU athletic program that initiated the process of assuring he would remain. It was smart business, and smart sports. Because the Hoosiers had to survive some severe challenges to be standing still unbeaten: not just what was anticipated from Ohio State, but also in that road game at Happy Valley. After a rough perform against the Nittany Lions – "They've got players," Cignetti said -- Mendoza had to engineer a game-winning drive in the final minutes punctuated by a desperate throw under pressure to the back of the end zone that Cooper turned into one of the most magical TD receptions in recent college football history.

This might be the catch of the year!

Fernando Mendoza just marched the Indiana Hoosiers down the field for 80 yards and puts IU back up against Penn State on the road with a TD pass to Omar Cooper Jr. In the back of the endzone.

It was one of the most insane catches you will… pic.twitter.com/Eh5BaJjxVr

— Dusty Baker (@DustyBakerTV) November 8, 2025

About the only question or challenge Cignetti has not been able to answer is the last one I posed to him after informing him of AllSportsPeople award: Which was tougher to achieve, the stunning turnaround to Big Ten contender or leveling up from there to the chance to win it all?

"It's all hard. Every year is hard. Every game is hard," Cignetti said. "We've had a lot of success everywhere we've been. Things fell into place year one. They did year two as well. It's hard to measure which one's harder."

One thing is certain in that debate: Each was the work of Curt Cignetti.

OK, two things: Each unsurpassed by his colleagues.