Success Is As Much About Fit As Talent—Just Ask Indiana Coach Curt Cignetti

In case anyone forgot, the College Football National Championship is won on the field.  

That might be the most obvious sentence ever written, but at the same time it seems that more and more fans and pundits believe the sport’s biggest trophy is won on National Signing Day, not during the title game.  

Of course, in reality, victories on the field aren’t built on recruiting metrics. They’re won by people working together in the trenches, often under the most extreme conditions.  

Yet, those who comment on the game seem too often to forget that fit matters as much or more than raw talent. Chemistry is key to surviving a season, at times even more so than a player’s vertical leap or catch radius.  

Relationships matter, too. Can you trust a person, can they trust you? The answer to these questions has nothing to do with a 40-yard dash time.  

Do you know who hasn’t forgotten this? Indiana University football coach, Curt Cignetti. The hottest name in college football—and perhaps in all of coaching—knows that winning is not always about finding superstars and collecting talent. It’s about fit. 

But what does that look like, exactly?  

It can be easy for a coach to look at a list of recruits handed to him by an intern and blindly go after the ones with the most stars next to their names. But what kind of strategy is that? 

Some coaches can’t wait to collect as many top recruits as possible. But that’s not how Cignetti, a former assistant under all-time signal caller Nick Saban, operates. He doesn’t look for stars first. Instead, he looks for flexibility. Literally.  

His philosophy is so well defined that it gets down to the ankle.   

“It’s a start-stop game,” Cignetti has said. “You’ve got to have those for change of direction, but you also need those to create explosive power. It’s a game of speed, quickness and explosive power.” 

Cignetti learned the concept from Coach Saban. When he brings a new recruit to Indiana, the coach works them out with his training staff. The result of that influence whether he will make an offer to the player. And it has a lot to do with—yes—ankle, knee and hip flexibility. 

How many of us would rely on such a particular way of evaluating talent? In business, for example, do we hire a person based on their resume and credentials, or do we look at how they might fit within the foundation we’ve already built? 

Thankfully, I’ve been lucky to work for several companies recently that have done exactly that—they’ve focused on fit, even to the exclusion of where a candidate’s diploma derives or where they’ve worked before. It’s a refreshing reality and one I hope to see more of as I speak around the country.  

But Cignetti gets it.  

His Indiana team is almost always at a deficit when it comes to the number of five-star recruits on the football field compared to their opponent. Indeed, when IU defeated Ohio State in December, Cignetti activated just two four-star recruits and zero five-star players for the game. In fact, Indiana’s football program has never signed a five-star recruit out of high school. Ever.  

Marquee names don’t necessarily mean titles. And Indiana can prove that to be true again on January 19 when the squad plays for the National Championship, favored against the University of Miami Hurricanes—a squad that boasts several former five-star recruits on the offensive and defensive lines.  

Still, that won’t scare Cignetti.  

“Can you keep [players] healthy?” Cignetti said of his philosophy. “Do you have a good culture? I mean, do they like it here? Do they like each other? Do you have good leadership? That’s all part of development, and I think we’ve excelled in those areas.”  

With a win on Monday against Miami, there will be no doubters left.