Curt Cignetti has brought Indiana to national championship game in just 2 years

MIAMI (AP) - Indiana coach Curt Cignetti built a winner right away with a recruiting strategy built for a new era of college football.

Turns out, he's not the only one with a knack for bringing talent to the Hoosiers.

On the eve of Indiana's first trip to the national title game, Cignetti recalled telling his wife that he planned on declining the opportunity to coach the Hoosiers. He liked James Madison. It felt like home.

And then the phone rang. It was Indiana athletic director Scott Dolson.

"He called me up and said, 'Congratulations, you're the new head coach at Indiana, and we're going to kick some butt,'" Cignetti said. "He didn't give me a chance to say no. He told me I'm the new head coach. My wife said, 'You should have seen that look in your eye,' like what did I do?"

That's how a winner was born - a team that has gone from a perennial loser to 26-2 over the past two seasons and is a win away against Miami on Monday night from bringing home the national championship.

It has been a winding road for the 64-year-old coach. But he had a pretty clear vision from the jump of what he wanted his future to look like, thanks to an early exposure to the game from a coaches' point of view.

Long before leading Indiana to its first undefeated regular season and national championship game appearance, Cignetti was 7 years old and watched every home West Virginia football game from the field.

It was where his father, Frank Cignetti Sr., served as an assistant from 1970 to 1975, before succeeding Bobby Bowden as the head coach in 1976.

In 1982, Curt Cignetti got his first taste of Indiana when his father transitioned to become the director of athletics at his alma mater, Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Frank Cignetti became IUP's head football coach in 1986 and led the program for 20 years.

In Western Pennsylvania, the natural progression was to work in the steel mill or coal mines. Frank Cignetti didn't go that route, and his oldest son quietly took notes.

"My dad was a great role model growing up. I was the oldest of four, and he led by example. He had a presence about him, and he had a great work ethic, disciplined commitment. Back then - grew up in Western PA, everybody worked in the mill or the mines, and he went to college and became an assistant at Pitt, Princeton, West Virginia for Bobby Bowden, became the head coach," Cignetti said. "He was my inspiration."

After graduating from West Virginia in 1982, Cignetti embarked on his own coaching journey, starting in the same place his father's did, at the University of Pittsburgh. He spent the next 24 years working his way up the college football ranks before landing with Nick Saban in Alabama as a recruiting coordinator and receivers coach.

It was Cignetti's last stop before making the jump to head coach, and perhaps the one where he learned the most. He was hired as IUP's head coach in 2011, just six years after his father had retired from the same position.

"I was hitting the big 5-0, I had a couple of daughters in high school that wanted to be doctors, Sam was a freshman at Alabama, and I didn't want to be a 60-year-old career assistant," Cignetti said. "I had grown up in the business. I had tracked assistant coaches' families and careers, and I didn't want to do that. So I bet on myself."

Fourteen years later, that has paid off. After stints at Elon and James Madison, he became the 30th head coach of the Hoosiers football team.

Several assistants and 13 players followed Cignetti from JMU to Indiana, including standouts Elijah Sarratt, Aiden Fisher and D'Angelo Ponds.

The Indiana coach was one of the few to see potential in Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Fernando Mendoza, who transferred from Cal.

His pitch? "Google me."

Fisher said it was a no-brainer.

"I trust Coach Cignetti's plan. He has a blueprint to win," Fisher said Saturday. "I know a lot of people really doubted him coming to Indiana, who was historically not a great football program. But it was just about trusting him, trusting that he was going to bring in the right people, which he did, and the coaches that I was able to flourish under at JMU."

What Cignetti has accomplished in his two years in Bloomington has turned heads all across the sport. He has brought a historically unsuccessful program to new heights. The Hoosiers have lost just two games in two years and clinched a College Football Playoff berth twice, most recently earning the No. 1 seed and first-round bye after an unbeaten 2025 regular season and Big Ten title.

Now, the team is taking on Miami in the national championship game.

"There's one more chapter to write," Cignetti said Sunday morning. "We'll find out (how it ends) in about 36 hours."