SOUTH BEND – Never shy of a line, Curt Cignetti dropped one more Friday as he sat down to his final postgame news conference of the season.
“It’s hard to say goodbye to your kids,” Cignetti deadpanned, “because they just watched their dad get his ass kicked.”
This was Indiana’s brash, Spurrier-like head coach acting as a lightning rod for so much of what went wrong in the No. 8 Hoosiers’ 27-17 season-ending College Football Playoff first-round loss at No. 5 Notre Dame on Friday night.
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The sheer tonnage of confusion that would have met that sentence four months ago is rivaled only by the potential impact of this remarkable season on the trajectory of an IU football program desperately fighting to escape its ugly past. Whenever the dust settles on this frustrating end to an exhilarating fall, there will be plenty of time to pass around credit for a season that rises head and shoulders above the other 125 in program history.
For the time being, the Hoosiers (11-2) and their fans will have to lick their wounds and take their lumps, from a barking mob of college football fans sprinting to the nearest social media microphone to tell them why they didn’t belong here in the first place.
Listen to none of it.
If IU football takes nothing else from Friday night, let it be this: Don’t for one moment lose the steely confidence that set the stage for this most unexpected of seasons. Apologize for nothing. That’s Indiana football’s identity now. Embracing it will win you games.
College football will want the Hoosiers to atone for Friday night. For Kurtis Rourke’s modest performance in what mostly qualified as an offensive no-show. For the lack of a productive pass rush on a night when IU needed to make Riley Leonard uncomfortable.
For deigning in the first place to take up space in a Playoff field that should have just been turned over to a bunch of three-loss SEC teams that never lost any of the hypothetical matchups this game could have been if the committee had just been willing to overlook all the times those teams fell flat on their face in the games that actually counted.
Pay no mind to SEC fans speaking in bad faith about everyone else’s program. It’s not to Columbia or College Station or Oxford that Indiana should look tonight. The Hoosiers earned what they accomplished this season, up to and including their place in the inaugural 12-team Playoff field.
“You are what your record says you are,” Cignetti said. “So, 11-2. Tied for second in the Big Ten. Made the College Football Playoff. And packed the stadium. Made a lot of people proud.”
They earned their defeat on Friday night too.
Notre Dame (12-1) ran through Indiana’s previously sure tackles. Riley Leonard beat the Hoosiers’ usually dominant pressure. Rourke never found his rhythm. But for a couple of garbage-time touchdowns, the final score would’ve been even uglier.
Of course, even a 24-point loss (the score was 27-3 before those late scores) wouldn’t even have ranked among the eight most-lopsided final scores of the four-team Playoff era. Once again, pay no mind to SEC fans speaking in bad faith about everyone’s program but their own. Indiana didn’t lose to Kentucky, so it doesn’t really matter what Ole Miss thinks.
What IU really answered for Friday night, other than its strength of schedule, was the way it crashed college football’s biggest party.
Starting with their coach’s offseason pronouncements (“Google me,” the Big Ten title game promise, the one-liners at media days), Cignetti set the tone for a season that saw — for the first time anyone could remember — an Indiana football that not just won at a historic rate, but refused to apologize for any of it, ever.
He swaggered through the Big Ten like the highest level of college football was simply a math problem for him. And his players happily followed suit, talking for 12 months about culture change and dreaming big dreams and national championships, and then backing an awful lot of it up.
Until they couldn’t anymore.
As recently as Friday afternoon, Cignetti visited the ESPN GameDay set and declared, “We don’t just beat top-25 teams, we beat the shit out of them.” And when one knocked him down the ladder a few hours later, Cignetti swallowed his medicine like someone who can take it as well as he can dish it out.
“We didn’t play our best game, but a lot of that was probably because of who we played,” Cignetti said. “They played well, and they beat us.”
All seasons end. Nearly all seasons end without a national championship. But taking their cues from their coach, IU fans embraced the remarkable nature of an autumn unlike they’d ever seen or will again. Even if the Hoosiers are, as Aiden Fisher all but promised postgame, right back here again in 12 months, there’s no feeling quite like the first time. The Beatles only got to release ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ once.
If there is a next time — and there very well may be — it will be because Cignetti and his staff learn some valuable lessons this time around. Because, as Cignetti said late Friday night, “everything is about recruitment and development, and now retention.” Because these Hoosiers showed IU football fans what is possible for them, allowing them to expect more than they ever have and adjust their view accordingly.
And because from his first day on the job, when Cignetti raised the Big Ten’s collective eyebrows with that “Purdue sucks, but so does …” missive in front of a sold-out Assembly Hall, Indiana decided it was done apologizing for all it had been. It would only focus from that moment forward, confidently, on what it could be.
It turned out it could be all this. There’s no reason to look back.
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