Indiana’s head coach is known for his talent evaluation. The skill comes from hours of grinding tape through the years.
A lot of duties end up falling on the head coach in NCAA Division-II college football.
Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti, who began his career as a head coach at D-II Indiana University of Pennsylvania, otherwise known as IUP, took on additional duties with the Crimson Hawks. Namely, assembling the program’s recruiting board.
It’s a difficult job for any program, with larger ones having several staffers dedicated to doing so. At IUP, Cignetti watched every single prospect on the Crimson Hawks’ radar, evaluating and ranking them over film session after film session.
It wasn’t just any time he was doing so, Cignetti said. When Christmas rolled around and campus operations, from academic to athletic, largely shut down and his staff was off, he’d be in IUP’s facilities grinding all that tape and doing the work.
“And when you become the head coach like a D-II, I watched every guy,” Cignetti said during a press conference on Wednesday. “I kind of did the board. Christmas holiday, everything shut down, coaches are off, I’m in there watching all the guys, right, ranking them. Just repetition is the mother of learning, and you get better and better at it. Once you become kind of the CEO and your stamp is on it, you want to be invested on who you bring through the door, coaches and players. You want to put the final stamp on them.”
All that work paid off for Cignetti, who’d previously worked in recruiting as an assistant at several programs including Pittsburgh, NC State and Alabama. That eye for talent has helped him turn Indiana into a bonafide national championship contender, with the Hoosiers earning the No. 1-seed in the College Football Playoff.
Category: General Sports
