Need a coach? Seek and ye shall find

Indiana dug a little deeper and found Curt Cignetti in 2024. Twenty wins later, he and Fernando Mendoza are riding high.

Fernando Mendoza after a win at Penn State

This might change by the time you reach the final paragraph, but here are the schools with the most prominently empty parking spots at their football offices:

Florida. LSU. Auburn. UCLA. Penn State. Arkansas. Oklahoma State. Virginia Tech. Stanford. Colorado State, Oregon State, UAB.

There’s every reason to believe that Florida State, Boston College, Michigan State and Maryland will give their coaches the big haircut, too.

Now, there’s no way Marco Rubio can handle all those head coaching jobs. Not even Lane Kiffin can be expected to. So you might see some funky names get introduced at the press conference, while the athletic director says, with steely-eyed sincerity, “This was our top choice all along.”

Since college football is such a derivative game, perhaps a bright administrator will use the following template when hiring the next genius:

Six years at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Two years at Elon University. Five years at James Madison. A record of 119–35. A few months shy of his 61st birthday.

That’s what Indiana University, Bloomington edition, did in 2024 when it hired Curt Cignetti. On Saturday the Hoosiers came back to beat Penn State, 31-28, and thus won their 10th game of the season. They also won 10 games last year. Those were the first 10-win seasons in the history of Hoosier football, which began in 1887.

Nobody envisioned such a thing at the time, except maybe Cignetti, who famously deflected a question about his qualifications by saying, “I win. Google me.” Nobody could say Indiana “won the press conference,” or hired a name famous enough to make the alumni hoist school flags or send donors scurrying to their vaults. LSU did that when it hired Brian Kelly from Notre Dame. USC did that when it hired Lincoln Riley from Oklahoma. Neither has made a College Football Playoff with those coaches, and USC won’t have a chance this year unless it wins at Oregon. But Indiana went to the playoff last year, losing at Notre Dame in the first round. It is ranked No. 2 in the CFP ratings today and needs only to beat Wisconsin and Purdue to finish 12-0 in the regular season, and nail down a place in the Big 10 championship game.

Cignetti is not the only example of an unknown soldier sprouting wings when put in charge of an unfamiliar army.

Ohio State is ranked No. 1. Ryan Day is the coach. He got promoted when Urban Meyer was “placed on administrative leave” at the beginning of the 2018 season, He was 3-0 in Meyer’s absence, became the permanent head coach the next year, and is 79-10 overal, with a 2024 CFP championship ring. If Meyer had left without controversy, there are zero chances, give or take a zero, that May would have been the next Buckeye coach.

Texas A&M is ranked No. 3. Mike Elko is the coach. He was an assistant for 22 years before Duke hired him, and A&M hired him two years later. Aggie fans didn’t exactly embrace the hire, but they did appreciate that Elko wasn’t Jimbo Fisher. Now A&M is 17-5 with Elko coaching, and undefeated atop the Southeastern Conference.

Alabama is ranked No. 4. Kalen DeBoer is the coach. He played at Sioux Falls, played in two different indoor football leagues and an independen baseball league, and was a college assistant or a high school coach for 17 years. He also took over the Sioux Falls program and won three NAIA titles in five years. Fresno State made him the head coach, Washington stuck its neck out to hire him away, and the Huskies played for the final BCS championship, losing to Michigan. That’s when Nick Saban retired at Alabama and DeBoer got the corner office in America’s most successful football program. The Tide was a bumpy 9-4 last year but is 9-1 now. More important, DeBoer currently has a spiffy head coaching record of 121-17.

Georgia is ranked No. 5. The coach is Kirby Smart, a Bulldog alum who sprouted from the House of Saban, where he was the defensive coordinator for national champions. Smart has coached Georgia to two national titles and a 113-20 record, and now he has a generation of Smarties of his own, six assistants who have become head coaches, including Dan Lanning at Oregon. Smart was an obvious and safe choice and might have been South Carolina’s choice if Georgia hadn’t called. But, still, he hadn’t been a head coach.

Cignetti is the one who might lead small-college coaches out of the wilderness. It’s the most drastic turnaround since Bill Snyder equipped the Kansas State program with teeth. Last year Cignetti fortified Indiana with his own refugees from James Madison, and some of them are still around, like pass rusher Aiden Fisher and cornerback DeAngelo Ponds. But in this year’s transfer haul, fourteen of the 22 Newsiers came from power-conference schools.

One was Fernando Mendoza, from Cal. Mendoza threw 30 touchdowns in his two years at Berkeley and then came to Indiana, joining his brother Alberto, also a quarterback. For Cignetti, Mendoza has 26 TD passes and five interceptions, and until Saturday he was considered a Heisman Trophy possibility, if not a favoite.

That began changing with 111 seconds left at Penn State, with the Hoosiers down, 28-24, and reeling.

Mendoza was sacked on the first play. On second-and-17, he began a series of improbable pitches-and-catches that might live inside the Hoosiers’ lean scrapbook forever. He hit Omar Cooper Jr. for 22 yards over the middle. He fired a 29-yarder to Corey Nowendowski, also over the middle. With 0:47 left, he hit Charlie Becker at the sideline to stop the clock. Finally, on third-and-goal from the Penn State seven-yard-line when nothing but a touchdown would do, Mendoza ignored an imminent hit from Zakee Wheatley and passed to Cooper in the back of the end zone. King Mack of the Nittany Lions was within hand-holding range of Cooper, until Cooper leaped, came down with the ball and somehow grazed the end zone with his toes, just inside the end line. Several replay officials had to confirm it. Several million fans and TV viewers had to confirm their own eyesight. Yet it was a touchdown, possibly the play of the year, and Indiana won, 31-28.

Mendoza is 6-foot-5, toughened by his years of Miami high school football, for Columbus. His four grandparents escaped Cuba to come to Miami. Mendoza was already a dedicated quarterback when he saw Zach Calzada, another grandson of Cuban immigrants, lead Texas A&M to an upset of Alabama. “I realized there is another one of me out there,” Mendoza said. “It inspired me.”

However, recruiting gurus ranked him a 2-star, on a scale of five. There’s no “hot seat” for those who make such miscalculations. They simply go back to rating the next crop of high schoolers, without a look-back. LSU and Penn State, to name two, are crammed with 5-star players who can’t gain five yards.

Anyway, few coaches were recruiting Mendoza. Miami coach Mario Cristobal had also attended Columbus and not even he was overly interested. So Mendoza was headed for Yale and was happy with it. But David Lee, Mendoza’s private QB coach, thought his man was overshadowed. He told Bill Musgrave, Cal’s offensive coordinator, to come on down. Things went well, and when Mendoza signed with Cal, he told head coach Justin Wilcox, “This is the best signing you’re ever going to make.” If that sounds familiar, Mendoza’s idol was a quarterback and a former sixth-round draft pick by New England, who told Patriots owner Robert Kraft the same thing.

Eventually Fernando wanted to be with brother Alberto, and, besides, he needed only three years to get a business administration degree at Cal. After that he helped found a global program to help nourish and develop youth, called “You Can Too.”

There are such things as Heisman moments. Jayden Daniels got his for LSU when he created 606 yards and five touchdowns in a win over Florida. Johnny Manziel got his for Texas A&M when he led a successful raid of Alabama. Mendoza’s drive at Penn State could well be the snapshot that separates him from Vanderbilt’s Diego Pavia and others, although one suspects Texas’ Arch Manning only needs a couple of long completions in big spots to reclaim the driver’s seat.

Meanwhile, Cignetti signed a $93 million, eight-year contract with IU that should take him into retirement. If the Hoosiers do fire him without cause, Cignetti gets every penny. But the wins and the crowds and the rare trip into college football’s heavens are what you get sometimes, when you conduct a true national search. For schools who can’t or won’t handle that, Cignetti knows a good search engine.