Curt Cignetti famously bet on himself, leaving Nick Saban's Alabama staff to drop two competitive levels to take his first head coaching opportunity at Indiana University of Pennsylvania for 2011. Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Icon Sportswire / Getty Images

To comprehend a scarcely believable college football reality, wind back 40 springs to the Piedmont region of North Carolina. There we find Davidson College, a school of fewer than 2,000 undergrads and a member of the Division I-AA Southern Conference, apparently unbothered by being bad. The previous two seasons featured four wins total. Practice schedules accommodated classes and labs, and not the other way around. Doing your best was more or less the bar for success.

Into this deep wallow walked 23-year-old Curt Cignetti, for the very first time a full-time assistant coach.

He had some thoughts on things. The notion that it was enough to try hard against better-resourced schools irked him. You have to believe you can win, Cignetti would tell players. On-field standards, meanwhile, were set aggressively and personally. When his quarterbacks didn’t nail a practice rep — a not-uncommon event — the former West Virginia backup took over and slung it himself. Between Cignetti and another staffer who eagerly hopped in drills, then-senior Jay Poag cracked a question before one workout:

Hey guys, think I’m going to get to throw some today?

“I talked at our senior banquet that year,” says Poag, who’s now the athletic director and head coach at Ambassador Christian School in Huntersville, N.C. “And I can remember the laughter when I stood up and said, ‘I think I might be the only quarterback in the country (where) my two coaches threw more passes in practice than I did.’”

So that’s how it started. How it’s going is a surrealist montage. Curt Cignetti is now a sandpapered 64 years old and in his second season as head coach of the Indiana Hoosiers, who are all of the following: undefeated, ranked No. 2 in the nation, playing for a Big Ten championship against No. 1 Ohio State on Saturday and a lock to reach the College Football Playoff twice in a row. This is a program that, in the preceding three decades, finished with a winning record four times. Then Cignetti arrived and the roof came off. It is fair to ask how. And why.

The answers might be more fun if they involved some sort of sorcery. They do not. A search for secrets through the lesser-known history of Curt Cignetti is one reintroduction after another to the Curt Cignetti everyone sees right now. “A cocky nerd,” in the words of Joe Gray, who had him as a tight ends coach for three years at N.C. State. The same straight-shooting, single-minded, film-obsessed, even-keeled but occasionally quirky football brain as ever.

The dots along his timeline aren’t droplets of magic potion. But they do connect.

“Football is what makes him tick,” says Elon deputy athletic director Steve Roach, who was Cignetti’s boss for two years at Division II Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP). “He loves it and his preparation is like no one I’ve ever seen. And the motor never stops.”

Or as former Pittsburgh coach Walt Harris puts it: “He is a little different. He’s going to say what he thinks. And that’s not negative. That’s reality. What you see is what you get.”

What you see, specifically, is a lifelong immunity to an identity crisis.

It could’ve caved in on the son of the late Frank Cignetti Sr., a Hall of Fame coach known best for his 20-year run at IUP, where the field bears his name. Curt Cignetti was a football kid and then a football man and eventually grinded his way to Nick Saban’s first staff at Alabama back in 2007. It’s the sort of gig that typically chainsaws through velvet ropes on the way to something bigger. It didn’t. Instead, Cignetti famously bet on himself, dropping two competitive levels to take his father’s old gig for his first head coaching opportunity in 2011, which led to jobs at Division I-AA Elon and then Division I mid-major James Madison and, at last, the chance to run a Big Ten Conference program generally accustomed to irrelevance.

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His career record as a head coach is now 142-37. Anyone who rode the Curt Cignetti riptide along the way learned this: He does not pretend to be someone else. The job is the job, and nothing matters except that which leads to success. “He was similar to what I see now: very direct, very strong, very passionate, and pretty about the business,” says Mark Comalander, who played quarterback for Cignetti at Rice in 1986 and 1987. “He was pretty motivated to get stuff done.”

There is tunnel vision, and there is a path seen in a pinhole and willed through it. Even though Davidson found a way to backslide in that fall of 1985 — it lost eight straight games to open a 1-10 slog overall — the sheer force Cignetti applied to the job reshaped the experience. Football, and the gig, was it for him. That alone provided a jolt. “It was refreshing,” Poag says. “It didn’t equate into wins. But we had a lot more fun.” The next fall, Cignetti dove into another morass with a new staff — Rice had won four games in the previous four seasons — and didn’t come up for air. It was both an “amazingly fun and competitive quarterback room,” per Comalander, and enough to make him abandon the idea of a career on a college sideline.

“I don’t know that they ever slept or ever went out,” Comalander says, “because it seemed like all they ever did was work.”

Guys, you gotta love the pro-cess, Cignetti would tell his players, drawing out that long ‘o’ like a proper scion of western Pennsylvania.