Curt Cignetti and the NIL/Portal Myth: Leadership and Culture Still Matter

Sports, man. What a game. And yes, coaching still matters. Leadership still matters. Previously, I wrote that “if you want to win championships, you need to build a championship culture — on purpose.” The 2025–26 Indiana Hoosiers just demonstrated that lesson with a clarity that should force every athletic director, business leader, and sports fan to recalibrate their thinking about what winning really takes. They didn’t just get better players. They didn’t just get richer boosters. They built a tough, disciplined, winning team.

And they built it fast.

Vision: Know Who You Are

If you’ve never watched Curt Cignetti describe his brand of football, do yourself a favor: Google him. What you’ll find is a leader with a vision and the ability to articulate that vision with the predictability of a drumbeat. He says it the same way, in the same cadence: at Indiana, James Madison, IUP, and Elon.

“From the first play to the last play. Fast, physical, relentless. Smart, disciplined, poised. One play at a time, six seconds a play. Every play’s got a life and a history of its own. Like it’s nothing-nothing. Not affected by success, not affected by failure. On to the next play. Never satisfied. Playing to a standard, not the circumstances of the game.”

That’s not media polish. That’s identity, repeated until it becomes the shared language of a team. You can tell how real a vision is by how consistently it shows up in how a team behaves under pressure. Indiana’s identity showed up drive after drive, week after week, all the way through January. There was a sameness to how they played, not in the sense of cautious predictability, but in the sense of cultural reliability. They were playing their game, not someone else’s.

There is great power in knowing who you are. Often, teams try to “discover” their identity over the course of the season. You hear it often: “They don’t know who they are yet.” Cignetti installed his vision from day one, and the players grew into it rather than searching for it. When you know who you are, you spend less time navigating noise and more time executing.

Leadership: Belief, Alignment, and Conviction

Cignetti became a meme this year: the gruff press conferences, the deadpan humor, the unbothered sideline demeanor. But memes don’t win sixteen straight games. Players don’t follow characters; they follow leaders. And what made Indiana so compelling was how Cignetti embodied the fundamental building blocks of leadership that matter in any performance environment: self-awareness, communication, and personal discipline.

The first piece was self-awareness. Cignetti knows who he is, what he values, how he leads, and how to connect with his players. There’s no theater to it, no performance art, no borrowed identity from the coaching-industrial complex. His teams don’t waste energy trying to decode their head coach or wonder what version of him is showing up today. Consistency of leader identity breeds trust, and trust accelerates buy-in and cohesion.

The second piece was communication. Not communication as inspirational speeches, but communication as clarity. Indiana understood exactly how they intended to win and what each player needed to do to make it happen. There was no mystery about the standard, no ambiguity about expectations, no hedging about outcomes. Clarity generates alignment, alignment reduces friction, and friction kills performance, especially in high-pressure settings.

But self-awareness and communication still need a third layer: personal discipline. Leadership is not merely what a coach says, it’s what a coach does, corrects, tolerates, and reinforces. Cignetti showed personal discipline in maintaining the standard when it would have been easy to relax it, bend it, excuse it, or ignore it. Conviction matters most when it becomes inconvenient. A leader without personal discipline produces a team without collective discipline.

That combination — self-awareness, communication, and personal discipline — is what transformed Indiana’s culture from poster-board rhetoric into behavior on Saturdays. It’s also why players followed for reasons deeper than hype or novelty. Real leadership works not because it is loud, but because it is consistent.

Discipline: Standards Over Circumstances

There is a common misconception that discipline is primarily about punishment or rigidity. At Indiana, discipline showed up instead as standards: the non-negotiable requirements for how the team would operate, prepare, practice, and perform. Talent varies. Circumstances change. Standards don’t.

Indiana was exceptionally clean , and not just in the obvious categories of penalties or turnovers, but in the deeper layers of situational football. Their tackling was consistent. Their communication was crisp. Their late-game operation was unhurried and unflustered. Even in high-pressure drives, the sideline never looked chaotic. They did not have the collective body language of a team bracing for something bad to happen, which is a subtle tell in college football.

Discipline is what bridges vision and execution. You could see it in the details: Indiana played the same way whether up 20 or tied with six minutes to go. They played to the standard, not the scoreboard, not the opponent, not the noise. That’s rare. Buy-in without standards is just enthusiasm; buy-in with standards becomes discipline. And discipline is one of the few sustainable advantages in a sport where talent acquisition is increasingly democratized and volatile.

The NIL + Portal Counterargument (And Why It Falls Flat)

The cynics will point to NIL and the transfer portal. Fair. Indiana benefited from both, and it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise. Mark Cuban’s checkbook certainly didn’t hurt. But NIL didn’t start in Bloomington, and neither did the portal. Indiana is not the only program with a billionaire benefactor (hello, Phil Knight and Cody Campbell, to name a few).

Money can acquire talent, but it cannot create accountability. It cannot install the identity. It cannot demand standards. It cannot produce discipline. Programs across FBS football have access to resources. Indiana had alignment. Alignment is harder to buy and harder to fake.

The Fast Turnaround Is the Story

One last fact worth acknowledging: Indiana won a national championship in Cignetti’s second year as an FBS head coach. The year before he arrived, they were 3–9. This year they went 16–0. That is not a Cinderella story. That is execution of a blueprint: Vision → Leadership → Standards → Discipline → Results

The Lesson Beyond Football

In a sport increasingly dominated by shifting market forces, Indiana proved something refreshingly old-fashioned: Culture still wins. Leadership still matters. Standards still separate.

Sports, man. What a game. It would be a hell of a movie.