Sunday Column: Hoosier Next Head Coach? Glowed-up Indiana is Proof That the Trip to the Top Doesn’t Have to Take Forever

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When you’ve been up for a long time and suddenly find yourself down, the number of teams who spent most of those up years under your foot but now are quick to line up to get some payback can be shocking.

Indiana, which served as a cure-all for several good-but-not-great Penn State teams following tough losses to the likes of Ohio State and Michigan over the years, was the latest to take a turn pecking on the carcass of the Nittany Lions on Saturday.

Except this Indiana team was all ‘growed up.’

These Hoosiers are everything the versions of Hoosiers who marched into Beaver Stadium to take yearly beatings weren’t. Tough. Resilient. Fundamentally sound. Refusing to beat themselves. Indiana didn’t do anything otherworldly on Saturday, but it didn’t have to. It simply kept coming, put pressure on the Nittany Lions offensively and defensively, capitalized on the switches in momentum, and just out-executed their opponent. This was a team that was built, structurally, schematically and mentally, to come into a crowded Beaver Stadium and hold its own against even a strong Penn State team, which the current Nittany Lions have not been confused with this autumn. After those Lions woke up from an afternoon season-long slumber on both sides of the ball and took the lead in the fourth quarter, the Hoosiers displayed that impressive resiliency again, marching down the field for the go-ahead score with under a minute to play then shutting the door on the Lions’ last-gasp drive.

So what is there to take away from another depressing afternoon in what has been an incomprehensibly depressing season for Penn State?

It doesn’t take that long to change a program’s direction these days, and Indiana is perhaps the most timely example.

Recently, I’ve seen a few talking heads bemoaning the lack of exciting name options on the list of potential James Franklin successors, which is a little ridiculous for a couple of reasons. A. Whatever list these people have in their heads or they’ve cobbled from purely speculative stories or even well-sourced insider reports does not, by definition, match the list Pat Kraft is compiling and culling and vetting in private.

And, probably more importantly, B. It doesn’t account for the Curt Cignettis of the world.

If you haven’t, per his now-infamous instruction, Googled Cignetti, he arrived in Bloomington with an impressive resume as both a position coach and recruiter (he mentored Philip Rivers at N.C. State and helped bring Mark Ingram and Julio Jones to Alabama) and as the head man at smaller schools, leading James Madison to the Division I semifinal or better in all three of his seasons there. He was a smart hire at a program that has been allergic to football success, but he certainly wasn’t an exciting one for anyone outside of Bloomington.

All he’s done since is lose one (1!!) conference game in nearly two full seasons, to the team whose name needs not be spoken but that beats everyone else in the Big Ten. And while it’s true that Indiana has made a healthier investment in NIL resources than many of its conference peers, it’s not as though the Hoosiers are loaded up with five-star talent. Their best defensive player, linebacker Aiden Fisher, is a transfer from JMU. Their quarterback, Fernando Mendoza, was a three-star recruit who went 9-10 in two seasons as a starter at Cal before transferring in this past season. He’s now arguably the top NFL prospect at his position in the class and was absolutely nails on Saturday after his interception helped Penn State climb back in it.

No, Cignetti is doing this with coaching and will and an attitude that probably rubs just about everyone outside his program the wrong way but has clearly instilled his players with confidence and maybe a healthy arrogance.

I won’t sit here and pretend I have any idea who the next Cignetti is or if he would be a fit in State College, but it stands to reason that there are a few of them out there, if Kraft is kicking over enough rocks during the next couple of months. The Lions only need to land one, and it doesn’t have to be a name most fans will recognize. And if Cignetti can take Indiana from its status as, well, Indiana to a top-two team in barely two years, think of what a similarly impactful coach could do at a place like Penn State, to not just clean up the mess of this doomed 2025 season but to infuse it with the kind of swagger and belief that Cignetti has the Hoosiers playing with now.

It was good to see some fight, and some improved execution, from the home team on Saturday. With each loss, though, the hole the Lions will have to climb out of gets deeper, another recruit on the fence raises an eyebrow, another fan ponders whether to renew season tickets. Instead of shaking their heads and worrying about the one or two plays that might have been the difference against Indiana (or Oregon, for that matter), the Lions should take heart that their fortunes, which reversed so quickly and wholly in just a couple of months it still strains credulity, could quickly reverse again.

The longtime conference punchline that plucked a gutsy win away from a desperate team by a toe drag and ran its record to 10-0 just showed them what that looks like.