How Indiana upended decades of futility to become college football’s most unlikely rising power

By Dana O’Neil, CNN

(CNN) — Galen Clavio walked into the student mailroom – back when student mailrooms were still a thing – and found an envelope stuffed in his mailbox. Inside were six tickets for each of that season’s Indiana University football games, free to him as a dorm resident because, to put it bluntly, no one was terribly interested in going to Hoosier football games, let alone paying for them.

It was 1997 and the Hoosiers were terrible. Not that being terrible was unusual. For the better part of its 138-year existence, Indiana football has excelled at being awful.

It owned the record for most losses in Division I history (713) and the worst winning percentage in Big Ten history (.421). Prior to last year, only 14 teams in school history had earned a trip to a bowl game and of the then-30 coaches to lead the program, only five left with winning records – just three since the turn of the 20th century and only one, Bo McMillan, since the end of World War II.

In 1976, Lee Corso, who coached the Hoosiers from 1973 to 1982, memorably stopped a game against Ohio State to snap a picture of his entire team under the scoreboard. The Hoosiers had just scored and led the Buckeyes 7-6 – the first lead Indiana held over Ohio State in a quarter century.

“I looked it up. Can you believe it? Twenty-five years! The goal of a lifetime,’’ Corso said after the game, explaining his rationale. Ohio State went on to win the game, 47-7.

Suffice to say, Indiana football was not an afterthought in the state. That would require it to be a thought in the first place.

“Being an Indiana football fan felt like being in a very small club that no one wanted to join,’’ Clavio, who is now the associate dean for undergraduate education at the IU Media School and director of the university’s sports media program, told CNN Sports.

This is basketball country, a reality proudly declared at the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame – “in 49 other states, it’s just basketball, but this is Indiana,’’ – which is located in New Castle, home also to the largest high school gym in the world (capacity 9,325) and the Steve Alford All-American Inn, where a gigantic sneaker sits out front of the hotel named after the beloved IU hoopster.

This is where 41,000 people came to watch high school star Damon Bailey play in his state championship game and where, if you ask people about the Wat Shot – Christian Watford’s 2011 buzzer-beating three-pointer against rival Kentucky – they not only know what it is; they know where they were when the ball went in.

“Hoosiers,” remember, might be a nickname for all IU athletes, but in the movie, they measured the height of a basket, not the length of the football field.

As a fourth-generation Hoosier, Clavio was reared on all of this, but his father also was a freshman during IU’s football glory year (singular), back in 1967 when Indiana went to the Rose Bowl (and, for what it’s worth, lost to USC). He regularly took his son to football games, largely because the tickets were cheaper and easier to get than they were for hoops games.

So, as misery-inducing as it was, Clavio regularly attended the football games as an undergrad and long after. When he started working at IU in 2009, he started a podcast, the “CrimsonCast,” in which he dissects both football and basketball. Maybe 1,000 listeners tuned in for the fall Sunday postmortems.

Last weekend, after the Hoosiers rocked Michigan State and rose to No. 2 in the Associated Press polls, more than 12,000 people tuned in to Clavio’s podcast. The Hoosiers are a hot topic and more a ridiculously happy one, having won more games (18) in the last season and a half than they amassed in the previous three years combined. After turning its own history on its ear by earning a spot in the College Football Playoff last year, Indiana is now one of just six undefeated teams left and that No. 2 ranking in the AP poll is a new program best.

The once forlorn small club of football faithful have welcomed a convoy of bandwagon hoppers. This Saturday’s noon ET game against UCLA will mark the eighth consecutive sellout for IU. After the allotted 11,000 student tickets sold out for the first time, athletic director Scott Dolson made more available.

They weren’t free.

‘Google me’

What is happening at Indiana is not normal, not ever, but certainly not in the revenue-rich era of college football.

To the spenders go the spoils, and while IU as an athletic department wasn’t low rent, it was not keeping up with its peers. According to the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database, IU regularly trailed its Big Ten brethren in annual football spending, $12 million shy of the median in 2019.

With the help of deep-pocketed donors, the university has slowly opened its wallet. Two years ago, it finally crafted a football-only weight room and added new suites and this year put down new turf in the stadium. The result: $61.6 million spending in 2024 (a number partially offset by the $15 million owed to former head coach Tom Allen), on par with the rest of the Big Ten.

But if football success was predicated on spending money alone, the Texas Longhorns would never lose a game. For the better part of its existence, Indiana football largely followed the playbook when it came to head coaching hires, either recycling former head coaches who’d been fired (Gerry DiNardo, Sam Wyche) or targeting assistants from other big-name programs (Tom Allen, Kevin Wilson).

In December 2023, after dismissing Tom Allen, Dolson opted to go in another direction, bringing in a wildly successful head coach who made up for what he lacked in name recognition with a history of winning.

Adding in his time at Indiana, Curt Cignetti is 137-37 as a head coach, a pattern of sustained success that ought to merit attention. Except his resume included stops at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, a Division II school; Elon, an FCS school; and James Madison (JMU), which only jumped to the FBS level in 2022. While moving from low- to mid- to high-major is a normal process in college basketball, it’s not regularly done in football.

Fair or not, Indiana was, frankly, the only sort of job the 62-year-old Cignetti was going to get.

In truth when, at a news conference, he provided his now legendary answer to a question about selling his vision to recruits – “It’s pretty simple. I win. Google me.’’ – he was being equal parts badass and honest. People did, in fact, have to Google him.

Dolson did not.

Indiana gets rolling under Cignetti

Dolson grew up in Michigan City, Indiana, closer in proximity to Michigan, Michigan State and Northwestern, but his heart always bled Hoosier red.

At the age of 9, Dolson attended a Bob Knight basketball camp, dreaming of finding a way to join the team. Smart enough to know he couldn’t play for the Hoosiers, he turned his attention to serving as a student manager as an undergrad. In 1987, when Knight and the aforementioned Alford combined to take Indiana to a national title, Dolson was a junior.

The year after he graduated, he joined the athletic department as a part of the Varsity Club and essentially never left.

That long history with the school means he knew well the historic pigskin ineptitude he was battling when, in 2020, he succeeded Fred Glass as AD.

“We’ve had our ups and downs, and unfortunately a lot more downs,’’ Dolson told CNN Sports. “We always were trying to find consistency and never could.’’

Dolson decided to not merely search for consistency; he opted to research it. He commissioned an in-house study to examine what did and didn’t work at Indiana, as well as consider how other schools with similarly strong basketball histories – Kentucky, Kansas and Duke – had at least made some inroads in football. He looked at everything from budgeting to scheduling to facilities.

He also formed a profile for the sort of coach he needed to succeed. At the top of the list: Someone with successful head-coaching experience. A strong recruiter and smart offensive mind who could develop quarterbacks also mattered, as did a person who appreciated continuity in his staffing.

When Dolson interviewed Cignetti, he found himself mentally ticking off the boxes on his wish list.

Cignetti was not blind to what he was walking into. Upon stepping off the plane for his introductory press conference, he sensed the sort of Eeyore gloom pervading Indiana football. It was worse than disappointment; it was disinterest.

So when he was introduced at halftime during a basketball game that day, he hit the Hoosier faithful square in the eyes, finishing his remarks with a literal mic drop by shouting, “Purdue sucks. But so does Michigan and Ohio State. Go IU!”

From unknown to untouchable

The energy and bluster helped but rare is the coach who doesn’t come in promising to win big.

What separated Cignetti was he had a plan to do it.

Often lost in the pursuit of the next head coach is just how hard it is to be a head coach. Cignetti has held the job title since 2011. Despite the laundry list of things to do at Indiana, he was not intimidated. He was not confused about what he wanted, or what his team’s identity would be.

Within days of signing his contract, Cignetti reached out to the staff under Allen and asked them to evaluate each of the returning players so that, when he arrived on campus, he could start making decisions. By the end of week one, a stunned Dolson told his wife Heidi, “This thing is already rolling.”

“When you take over a program, but especially football because it’s so big, it can be overwhelming,’’ Dolson said. “Like where do you start? He knew what he wanted, and how he was going to do it from day one. It was, ‘This is what we’re going to do, how we’re going to do it, and we’re not tolerating anything else.’’’

In a way, Cignetti built the Indiana roster in his own image – on the backs of players hungry to prove their worth.

His starting quarterback in 2024, Kurtis Rourke, came from the Group of 5 Mid-American Conference (MAC) member Ohio University, and threw for 3,000 yards and 29 touchdowns. Lead running back Justice Ellison came from underwhelming Wake Forest, and rushed for more than 800 yards. Top receiver Elijah Sarratt followed his coach from James Madison and hauled in 53 catches for 957 yards. Linebacker Aiden Fisher also came from JMU. He led the defense with 118 tackles.

He’s followed the same formula this year. Running back Kaelon Black, another James Madison transfer, leads the team with 439 yards on the ground and Sarratt is back atop the receivers, with nine TDs and 603 yards receiving.

And then there is this year’s quarterback. A coveted player at the time of his transfer from Cal, Fernando Mendoza does not come to his Heisman-contending season via a gilded path. A former three-star recruit out of Miami and the grandson of Cuban immigrants, he initially signed with non-scholarship Yale before getting a late bite from Cal. He grew into his greatness.

It’s all put Indiana into a rather unique pickle. Instead of searching for his next coach, Dolson had to make sure he could hang on to the one he had.

Cignetti’s success coupled with IU’s lack of tradition ordinarily would make the coach ripe for the picking from other bigger, more established programs. Dolson stopped the rumor mill before it started to churn, offering his coach a new eight-year, $93 million deal last week.

That’s a nice salary jump for a man who was making $670,000 two years ago at James Madison.

Cignetti rewarded himself by buying some new furniture, though he kept a 36-year-old, well-worn Bradington Young recliner, despite protests from his wife, Manette. “It’s untouchable,’’ Cignetti told the Big Ten Network.

Now, so is the coach.

Energy, belief and hope

The schedule breaks favorably going forward. Of Indiana’s remaining five opponents, UCLA is the only team with a winning record in the Big Ten. The rest are a combined 1-15 in the league, and a would-be reckoning at Penn State appears far less daunting now that the Nittany Lions fired their coach and lost their quarterback to injury.

That would set up a potential Big Ten Championship Game showdown with the one contender the Hoosiers won’t face in the regular season: Ohio State. The Hoosiers have won the conference title twice before, but it’s been almost 60 years since that glorious 1967 campaign.

It is all quite heady and IU fans are basking in the joy. Clavio, for one, made the 10-hour roundtrip drive to Iowa and flew out for the game at Oregon. He’s already contemplating how to get to Maryland and Happy Valley.

Patrons at Nick’s English Hut, the go-to spot for post-hoops victory revelry, broke out into song as the game clock hit zeroes against Oregon – a rousing rendition of the famous chorus from “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” – and people are already imagining the giddy conundrum of important football games bleeding into basketball season.

It’s also created yet another delightful first for the fall season in Bloomington: How to block out the noise.

“I’ve been on this campus since my freshman year in 1984 and the feeling on campus with football, I’ve never seen anything like it,’’ Dolson said. “There’s energy. There’s belief. There’s hope. But, and I know it sounds cliché, but internally, we’re focused on the work.

“We’re not thinking about how far we’ve come and what we’ve done. Because when you focus on the work, you’re thinking about what you haven’t done yet.’’

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