SIAP but how is Indiana so damn good?

They aren’t.
Most teams this year are average— everyone is beatable.

Their 2 deep is almost entirely 4th and 5th year guys. A handful of special 3rd year talents.

That is overlooked this day and age, but experience still wins over young, raw talent.

I would say having a Heisman QB touching the ball on every play is a plus, but having that Defense, just special. Holding Bama to 3 points is a bigger deal imo…

They win in the trenches with older classman with experience.

I’ve seen 4-5 of their games this year and came away impressed with their tackling each time. When they come up to make a play there is rarely a miss or a busted tackle. They get the guy to the ground.

I’m certain that the other position groups also do all of the litttle things well, which is a sign of good coaching. Put it all together and then combine it with effort and you have something special.

Power, discipline, intelligence.

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The bigger question is how did it take Cignetti this long to become such a dominant force and how was he under the radar until his 60s?

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I think it is because he has a bit of an odd/acerbic personality plus a degree of stubbornness. He's not an overly enthusiastic guy and has kind of a "you either care for me or not, I don't give a shite" attitude. Obviously, his personality/mindset works well as a HC...but it probably turned many off when he was trying to get to that spot.

He also didn't want to take the usual route to being a HC. He was on Saban's staff at Alabama from 07-11. He probably could have leveraged that into a non-power conf. OC job...which may have eventually led to a non-power conf. HC job. But he didn't want to be a coordinator. He only wanted to be a HC. No one in D-1 would hire him as a HC from being a position coach, so he took a HC job at a D-2 school.

He basically took the same path as a guy like Kalen Deboer did (D-2, G6 HC, power conf. HC). But whereas Deboer started that path at 30, Cignetti started when he was 50

development and time in system.

we have had the luxury of starting with more decorated stars labeled talent, but have failed at a bunch of positions to develop them beyond where they started relative to our opponents.

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agreed, another mystery. How did Cignetti become a football savant at age 60 something all of a sudden.

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He didn’t “just become one.” Just go look at his career. He was a career position coach, but after 4 years working under Nick Saban, he made the choice to go down levels to become a head coach, rather than try to get an OC gig and work up from there. That’s a much longer path to get yourself noticed, but it worked.

That path resulted in him learning how to be a successful head coach over 12 years at 3 different levels of football. He took over three losing programs and turned them around immediately. Just because nobody was noticing until he got to Indiana, the man has been a damn good coach for a long time.

I don’t think it’s an accident that Cignetti’s program looks a lot like ours did from 2000-2003. He obviously learned a lot from Saban in his time at Bama. The portal just allowed him to speed up the rebuild at Indiana over what was possible here in the 2000s.

Maybe they aren’t the same in overall talent level, but they are in how disciplined and tough they play. Right now, Indiana looks and plays the game like a 2010s coached Saban team.

Go back and listen to Saban’s quotes from last week about talking to his “golfing buddies” about Indiana who thought Bama would just roll over them. He broke it all down before the game. He knew exactly what he was looking at.