Curt Cignetti is a national championship-winning coach now and probably the most unexpected one in recent history. But before he came to Indiana to change the program’s trajectory, he had been coaching since 1983. From stops at Temple to Rice to serving as QB coach at NC State, every stint taught him something. But the best place he learned those natty-winning habits was Alabama in 2007. A tenure that made his 27 years worth of coaching experience look feeble. Unknowingly, though, Cignetti was getting a more nuanced coaching philosophy from his father.

“I went with him (Nick Saban) in 2007 [as] part of his original staff. I just learned so much,” Curt Cignetti said on Josh Pate’s May 13 podcast. “He had a philosophy. He had been a head coach 13 or 14 years by then, and he could lay it out there where it just made so much sense. And he had an organized, detailed plan for everything. After one year with coach [Saban], I felt like I had learned more about how to run a program than maybe the previous 27 as an assistant. And I come from a coaching family, and my dad is a Hall of Fame coach.”

While the world now knows about Nick Saban’s ‘process’ and the results it produced, the former Alabama head coach himself had some ‘Cignetti’ influence on him. Frank Sr. was West Virginia’s head coach from 1976 to 1979, and that’s when Nick Saban also joined his staff as his DBs coach. That past connection was the reason why Curt and Nick Saban became acquainted, as Cignetti remained on Saban’s staff for 4 years, coaching WRs.

For Cignetti, then, he has learned a combination of his dad’s philosophy and Nick Saban’s. Nevertheless, the Indiana HC has increasingly said that the philosophy at his Indiana program is influenced by Saban. Like Saban, Cignetti also focused on the process, daily improvement, and correcting fundamentals. That production-over-potential approach was partly why Cignetti won the national title.

For Saban, though, Curt Cignetti’s father had a significant influence on him, teaching some of the recruiting fundamentals. Saban perfected and refined it throughout his coaching career, yet people still cannot overlook its influence.

“Frank taught me to figure out who was the key in the recruiting process. Who’s going to have the most influence? He was a master at that,” Saban said about Frank Sr. Having worked with both father and son, Nick Saban accepts Curt’s philosophy resembles more like his father’s. Curt more often speaks his mind, never minces his words, and keeps “strong beliefs,” and that’s what Frank Sr. also did.

Curt’s father, Frank Cignetti Sr., was the head coach at West Virginia and remained the head coach of the Division II IUP program from 1986 to 2005. In the latter stint, he won 2 PSAC championships along with 14 Western Division titles, becoming one of the most celebrated head coaches at the D2 level. For Curt Cignetti, his dad was the primary reason he entered coaching, and through him, his footballing philosophy took root. But Saban still had a crucial role in that journey.

“My experience with Coach Saban was invaluable,” Cignetti said. “Every day was 4th-and-one with Coach Saban. But that’s the way it had to be, kind of, to fight complacency and find the edge on a daily basis, and be as good as you could be. And I just learned so much.”

Graduating from his dad’s program at West Virginia in 1982, the Indiana head coach spent two years as a graduate assistant at Pittsburgh. After progressing through several ranks, becoming QBs coach at NC State in 2000, Cignetti finally went to Alabama in 2007 when Nick Saban was assembling his fresh coaching staff and had just arrived in Tuscaloosa. Saban, though, was already a renowned head coach, having won a national title with LSU in 2003, and Cignetti couldn’t quite shake the prospect of working under him.

Curt Cignetti made his own path after Alabama

Curt had a similarity to his dad, which is why Nick Saban made him his recruiting coordinator. As for Curt, he believed in his dad’s philosophy, just as Saban did, taking up the same project at IUP that his dad left to him in 2011. It didn’t make sense at the time, even to Saban, since Cignetti had helped Bama win the 2009 national title and could have landed other high-profile jobs. But immediately, when Cignetti won a championship with IUP in 2012, it became clear Cignetti was now forming a trajectory of his own.

“He had some questions whether that would be a very good move for me,” Cignetti said about Saban asking him about the IUP move. “I was just ready to kind of run my own show. I had been an assistant coach. And I was hitting 50. I was just ready for something different. And I respected his opinion, but I decided to make the move.”

Nick Saban undoubtedly had a profound influence on Cignetti. But without the Indiana head coach charting his trajectory and taking initiatives, something his father taught him, he would never have won the natty with Indiana.