Curt Cignetti Explains Indiana Football Team’s Travel Schedule at UCLA

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — After more than a year of discussions about what it might look like, Big Ten expansion is finally here.

For the Indiana football program, it will be felt in the most tangible way yet as it travels to UCLA for its Big Ten opener Saturday at 7:30 p.m. ET at Rose Bowl Stadium.

Although this is Curt Cignetti’s first season with the Hoosiers, the 14-year veteran head coach has a well-established way of doing things, and it’s worked to the point of a 121-35 record.

“You know how I run my program,” Cignetti told Indiana sportscaster Don Fischer Thursday night on the Inside Indiana Football radio show. “I’m very structured and organized.”

Cignetti credits part of his approach to movement to Walt Harris, Pittsburgh’s head coach from 1997-2004. Cignetti was the quarterbacks and tight ends coach under Harris from 1997-99.

“(Harris) was the first guy I met who wanted to get to the hotel as late as possible on Friday night, to do everything on campus on Friday,” Cignetti said. “That way, players don’t miss a lot of classes. You have your meetings there. You do your tour there. You can eat there or have your snack, depending on whether you’re flying in or not. We did it that way at NC State, and we did it that way at Alabama, too. So my routine has worked for me, so I don’t change it.”

Because of the schedule change and the transcontinental flight for Saturday’s game in Pasadena, Calif., Cignetti is having to adjust his travel schedule in Indiana a little more than usual.

For a typical away game, Cignetti said assistant coaches would come to the office around 9 a.m. on Friday and staff would meet with the team around 3 p.m.

But this Friday, Cignetti said the coaches will arrive at 7 a.m. ET and meet with the team at 11:30 a.m. The rest of the day goes like this.

“On Friday, I’ll talk to the team for about five minutes. We’ll do special teams meetings for 25 minutes and offensive and defensive meetings for about an hour-plus, and then we’ll do about a 25-minute walk-through of the field,” Cignetti said.

“Then the players come in, shower, snack, get on the bus, go to Indianapolis and charter from there. They probably have another snack and a four-hour flight to Los Angeles. Of course, the time changes, so we land at LAX, I think around 6:30 a.m. Pacific time. So we get to the hotel in about an hour and 20 minutes from what I understand, and we set up dinner for them, show them a promo video and put them to bed. It’s only 9 a.m. West Coast time, but it’s midnight back home, so I’m sure a lot of people are looking forward to catching up on some sleep on the plane.”

The game is scheduled to start at 4:30 p.m. PT, which is 7:30 p.m. ET in Bloomington. It’s a more extreme travel situation than most, but Cignetti has tried not to change his routine too much, other than moving up Friday’s schedule by a few hours.

“When you walk off the field on Thursday, I think all the coaches are probably going to feel a little rushed from the things they normally do after practice on Thursday, heading into meetings on Friday,” Cignetti said. “But we’ll be fine.”

Fischer then asked Cignetti if he felt his team understood that there were rules to follow throughout this kind of trip.

“Well, I mean, look. We’ve put a lot of time and investment into this and the players want to be as good as they can be, they want the team to be as good as it can be, and the coaches’ job is to develop the players so they can be as good as they can be and the team can be as good as it can be,” Cignetti said. “It takes special qualities and characteristics, focus, commitment, discipline and the ability to keep your eyes on the target, on what’s important, and to cut through the noise and the clutter.”

“You know, it’s not like third or fourth grade, where you go on a trip and you come back and show and tell, right? It’s not like that. We’re going to play a football game on a 100-yard field. It just so happens to be in California, okay. That’s just the way it is.”

Indiana enters its Big Ten opener with a 2-0 record after a 31-7 win over Florida International and a 77-3 victory over Western Illinois. Cignetti said he liked that the Hoosiers played with energy and intensity from the first snap to the last against Western Illinois, because games against lesser opponents can sometimes be sloppy.

“We did a lot of good things in those games, but we didn’t play a top-25 team,” Cignetti said. “Let’s be realistic, okay. But I saw progress and I saw individual development, collective development and we have confidence in ourselves at the moment.”

He’s seen quarterback Kurtis Rourke grow on the field and in his leadership, and he was happy to see so many Hoosiers cheering for each other during the game.

Cignetti also liked the fact that the score allowed him to play a large majority of the roster. Cignetti was intrigued by the performances of backups like Charlie Becker, Khobie Martin, Rolijah Hardy, Ta’Derius Collins and several young offensive linemen, who played late in the game.

Cignetti believes Indiana’s secondary defense got away with some coverage lapses, which will hurt them against better opponents.

“I’m not going to say I like where we are right now, because I don’t think you can like where you are in the middle of a season,” Cignetti said. “You can like where you are when the season is over, but not right now. We have to keep moving forward.”

But overall, Cignetti has seen growth in his program since taking over in December.

“I felt like we made tremendous strides in our culture from the day I was hired to our first game, but we had to put it into practice on the field,” Cignetti said. “The proof had to be on the field, and the only way to measure that is performance on the field.”

The Hoosiers will face their biggest test to this point of the season Saturday against UCLA.