SO IT CAN BE DONE
When the Indiana University football team won Monday night’s College Football Playoff National Championship game, they capped off an undefeated season and what has to be considered one of the great rags to riches stories in the history of sports. Head coach Curt Cignetti was hired to lead the Hoosier football program two years ago, and in doing so took over the losingest college football team in America. As a lifelong sports fan and an Indiana native, I can tell you from first-hand experience that calling Indiana football historically irrelevant is an understatement. They were, in almost every way, a model of mediocrity.
For that reason, I found Coach Cignetti’s initial approach to accepting the job almost comical. “I win,” he famously said in his introductory press conference. “Google me.” Alright pal. We’ll see. More interviews and public appearances in his early days on the job had me trying to figure out whether I was impressed or annoyed by his loud and somewhat delusional approach to this new era of IU football. He had his share of success at smaller schools, Google revealed, but this was big-time college football. And this was Indiana.
You know by now that Curt Cignetti not only backed up those seemingly absurd initial expectations, he exceeded them. Almost instantly, he turned his vision into reality through a disciplined, unrelenting approach. His teams played to a standard of elite execution and precision performance that embarrassed teams IU had never been able to compete with before. He’s taken Indiana football from national afterthought to national champion in two short years, and while local fans and national media have celebrated this Cinderella story, Cignetti’s approach has remained unchanged - and by all accounts, unsurprised - by his program’s almost inexplicable success.
Curt Cignetti’s tenure at IU helps highlight that while you can define it in many different ways, leadership starts as a transfer of belief. The team’s success has been built on discipline, on commitment, and on expectation. But the foundation of it all - the starting point for Cignetti, since that introductory press conference - was belief. When he said that Indiana football was gonna win and win big, I have to admit that like pretty much everyone else I thought to myself, “it can’t be done.” Truth be told, I bet many of the IU players and staff probably felt the same way. Cignetti recognized from the start that his first responsibility was to transfer his unwavering belief to the people around him. The discipline, the commitment, and the expectation - like the success - followed closely behind.
I’m highlighting this important element of Coach Cignetti’s leadership example because right here today, many of us find ourselves facing long odds or slim chances in some important areas of our own life. There are places we've conditioned ourselves to accept that it can't be done. Maybe you’re working to turn around a struggling team or failing business. Maybe some important personal pursuit hasn’t gone the way you wanted or expected. Maybe you find yourself surrounded by people who are all too willing to accept irrelevance or mediocrity. There’s a lesson this Indiana football turnaround invites us to learn, and an example Coach Curt Cignetti invites us to follow. They prove that a turnaround - even one of epic proportions - is possible. Yes, it takes discipline and commitment and expectation. But first, it takes belief.
Sometimes we need people like Curt Cignetti - people who are so confident and so committed to their own pursuit that they inspire us to be more confident and more committed to our own. We need people who force us to acknowledge that we were wrong, people whose performance pokes us right in the chest and makes us admit, “ok...so it can be done.” We need people who validate that with an unwavering belief - and the discipline, the commitment, and the expectation to match - that success can be found, and that in the areas that matter most to us, maybe we need a little more of it ourselves.
