BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Indiana coach Curt Cignetti saw all the evidence of a dominating win Saturday.
The Memorial Stadium scoreboard showed Indiana’s 56-9 victory over Kennesaw State. The box score mirrored the lopsided score. The offense scored on six consecutive full-fledged possessions from the end of the first half through the middle of the fourth quarter. The defense didn’t allow a touchdown.
But in this moment, Cignetti’s eyes are fixated on the wooden podium before him. His face relaxed and his smile wide, Cignetti appears satisfied. Don’t let his body language fool you. He’s not there yet.
“I’m never relieved,” Cignetti said postgame. “I’m going to be relieved when I go up to my office and crack a beer. But on the field, I’m never relieved.”
Cignetti, however, was pleased — he said so four times. He doesn’t often admit his satisfaction, but he’d seen too many positives to ignore it.
He also liked what he didn’t see: Complacency.
“When we built the big lead, I liked the way our guys kept playing one play at a time like it was nothing-nothing,” Cignetti said. “I didn't see guys laughing on the sideline, kind of a relief syndrome. That's what we ask them to do. (The) time to be satisfied is in the locker room.”
Cignetti acknowledged he needed to see Indiana put together a performance like it Saturday. The last time the Hoosiers “really waxed somebody,” he said, was last season’s 66-0 victory over Purdue. It had been 281 days.
Cignetti revealed he didn’t know if this year’s Hoosiers had the qualities necessary to snap the drought. There were a lot of new faces last season, he said, but many of them joined him in moving from James Madison University to Bloomington. They already understood his culture, standard and expectation.
Sans center Pat Coogan, who transferred from College Football Playoff National Championship runners-up Notre Dame, much of Cignetti’s transfer haul for this year lacked a winning background. Some, he said, come from .500 programs. They’ve never experienced a championship-caliber culture.
Cignetti reminded his coaches of that Saturday morning.
“You've got to really coach this team every day right now, and reinforce the standards and the expectations in everything you do,” Cignetti said. “Like the walk-through yesterday, I wasn't real pleased with. But it was all new guys, and you just can't assume they know because they don't. They don't know, they don't know.”
The standard starts at the top, and Cignetti spent much of the fourth quarter pacing the sidelines telling his team to remain focused. The Hoosiers responded.
Indiana led 21-6 at halftime, but Cignetti didn’t like how the Hoosiers “stumbled and bumbled” into the break. Kennesaw State had a pair of field goal drives to close the half, and two of Indiana’s three full drives on offense didn’t produce points.
In the second half, with their coach and self-proclaimed tyrant as intense as ever, the Hoosiers found themselves.
Kennesaw State started the third quarter with a six-play, 44-yard drive that ended with a 50-yard field goal. The Owls didn’t score again.
Indiana’s offense scored on its first five possessions after halftime.
Senior receiver Elijah Sarratt logged two of his three touchdown receptions in the third quarter. Redshirt junior receiver Omar Cooper Jr. turned an end-around into a 75-yard rushing touchdown. Senior wideout E.J. Williams Jr. caught his first touchdown pass since 2020. Sophomore receiver Charlie Becker scored his second career touchdown.
The Hoosiers finished with 593 yards of offense, including 356 yards in the second half. After the break, they averaged 10.6 yards per play, picked up 16 first downs to Kennesaw State’s five, converted on all three third-down attempts and outscored the Owls 35-3.
And after a Week 1 victory in which Cignetti, deadpanned and stern, said he wasn’t pleased with Indiana’s performance, the Hoosiers’ final 30 minutes Saturday gave him reason to smile.
“It was good to get back kind of to that,” Cignetti said. “We took it over.”
Six of Indiana’s 11 wins in 2024 came by at least 29 points. The Hoosiers’ dominance Saturday — from their disruptive defense to explosive offense — looked eerily similar.
Following Indiana’s victory over Old Dominion, Cignetti and several players compared the team’s struggles to last year’s opener against Florida International. The offense struggled, while the defense, apart from a few lapses, held firm.
The Hoosiers’ offense, with new quarterback Fernando Mendoza, faced natural bumps in the road. Their defense, however, didn’t look too recognizable to defensive coordinator Bryant Haines, who said Thursday his unit lacked aggression.
Indiana’s defense responded with 14 tackles for loss Saturday, and perhaps more importantly, played to its traditional style.
“Last week really didn't feel like our defense,” senior linebacker Aiden Fisher said. “Today felt a lot better, a lot more comfortable for our defense. Being able to play fast off each other, get vertical in gaps.”
Fisher added there’s a sense of relief seeing Indiana’s defense play to such a level with new faces in key places at all three levels.
“I think when we bring guys in, too, we know they can fit our system,” Fisher said. “They buy in quick, and they want to play in our system. Week 1 was an odd offense that isn't very conventional. They were also a little odd when it comes to unbalanced sets and empty sets.
“But at the end of the day, we just played a lot better defense holistically.”
Fisher recorded 2.5 tackles for loss, the second-most in his four-year career. He tied for the team lead with senior edge rusher Kellan Wyatt, who transferred from Maryland to Indiana in April.
Wyatt missed an assignment in Week 1, pursuing an Old Dominion running back and not staying home on a read option. Monarchs quarterback Colton Joseph capitalized, sprinting 78 yards to the endzone.
Any such lapses Saturday weren’t as noticeable. Wyatt bounced back from his rocky Indiana debut with nine tackles and 2.5 tackles for loss, which, like Fisher, was the second-most in his career.
Wyatt’s adjustment mirrors the positive step Indiana made from Week 1 to Week 2. Cignetti expected such a leap, but to see it from a transfer like Wyatt, who went 4-8 with Maryland last season, reflects further buy-in.
And for Wyatt, it starts with the culture Cignetti instills.
“When you have a head coach that leads the way he does, everybody respects him, and it makes us, obviously, want to listen and go harder,” Wyatt said. “We felt like coming out in the second half, the very first thing was not to come out there half-stepping and loafing. He made it an emphasis to come out there and play harder than we did in the first half.”
Indiana subsequently turned its 15-point lead into a 49-point blowout.
The Hoosiers were 35-point favorites. Their victory, and the margin associated with it, may soon be forgotten.
But the lessons learned from Saturday’s victory could permeate throughout the season. Culture building can only go so far during the offseason, and teams add character when they’re thrown into the fire on gamedays.
Cignetti didn’t know if his team had a killer instinct. The Hoosiers had the chance, he said, to put a fork in Old Dominion last week. They didn’t. They flipped the script against Kennesaw State.
And it all begins with the coach who, no matter the score, always keeps the pedal to the medal — because he wants his team to understand what a championship culture looks like.
“You're trying to really teach habits,” Cignetti said. “How you do something is how you do everything, and you're either improving or you're getting worse. So if you're playing to the circumstances of the game, you're getting worse. You've got to be able to handle success and failure and then play the next play at your very best.
“Those are habits, and you're trying to create those habits.”
Those habits have, in Cignetti’s past, led to wins. The baseline of those habits appeared Saturday.
It resulted in an upbeat — yet never satisfied — Cignetti, who walked into the press room postgame, threw up a peace sign, and asked how reporters were doing. Then, he stepped to that wooden podium and talked about his own day — one in which his team answered the bell and showed perhaps its clearest sign yet that it can match Cignetti’s standard.
“I think we made the improvement we needed to make,” Cignetti said. “It's far from perfect, but we took a step forward with the step we needed to take.”