Indiana football has one last dragon to slay in one last grandaddy of them all

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LOS ANGELES — It had to be Alabama.

Indiana traveled here this week not wanting to add any more weight to an occasion already bearing plenty. A first Rose Bowl appearance since 1968. A first outright Big Ten championship since 1945. A season of unprecedented success.

Still, this was unavoidable.

For Alabama, the stage upon which IU football now stands is familiar. Expected, even. But the Tide have never in their modern history had to kill the ghosts Indiana spent the last 24 months hunting down.

So many of those are gone now. Michigan and Illinois and Iowa and Oregon and Penn State and Ohio State and consecutive College Football Playoff appearances saw to that. Whether anyone will say it outright, there is just one left.

Not the team, no. But the institution, and what it represents. It wears its colors as its emblem — with jersey numbers on its helmet and a case full of honors Indiana has rarely touched — an avatar for all the doubt and disrespect the Hoosiers have raged against on their historic climb.

Kalen DeBoer built Alabama football staff with an IU base

No one inside the Alabama football complex will have intended that.

If anything, the opposite. The shared bonds between the two programs are well-established.

That in its own way will make Thursday particularly profound for IU fans, because there was a time when — unlikely as it seems — so much of what Alabama has now Indiana once believed represented its brighter future.

It was when Kalen DeBoer arrived as offensive coordinator and Kane Wommack rose to defensive coordinator that Tom Allen’s project really took flight in Bloomington. After DeBoer returned to Fresno State as coach, and Nick Sheridan took his place, the Hoosiers came closer to winning a Big Ten title than they had in a generation.

And, as that hope disappeared with remarkable speed, DeBoer brought some of it with him to Washington, nearly winning both a Heisman Trophy and a national championship with Sheridan on staff and Michael Penix Jr. behind center in Seattle.

When DeBoer parlayed that into the Alabama job, he brought Wommack on board from South Alabama, and linked back up with former IU staffers including David Ballou. As Indiana searched for a fresh start in 2023, fans watched their old one reform in Tuscaloosa.

Curt Cignetti can prove leaving Alabama football, leading IU was bet worth taking

What they didn’t expect — or at least could not predict — was for that fresh start to prove it could be all this.

Curt Cignetti remains firmly complimentary when he talks about his time at Alabama. Rarely does a day go by, he said recently, that he does not refer back to the experiences of his four years on staff as Nick Saban’s wide receivers coach and recruiting coordinator, a period which saw Cignetti help Saban win the first of his six national championships in Tuscaloosa.

Yet if IU fans feel any contempt from the apparatus surrounding Alabama, after two years of loud doubt down south, Cignetti could be forgiven for seeing some old barriers across the field as well.

Tuscaloosa was his last stop before getting into head coaching the hard way. Despite success recruiting and developing players, and the obvious ties to Saban’s soaring star, Cignetti looked around in 2010 and saw coordinator and head jobs bending toward younger men.

Confident he could run his own program — and despite, he’s fond of saying, the pay cut from the SEC down to Division II, with three kids “wanting to be doctors” — he bet on himself and his father Frank Cignetti Sr.’s old job at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and the rest is history.

The man he opposes can relate. DeBoer started his head-coaching career at Sioux Falls, his alma mater, at the NAIA level, and had to travel through coordinator stops at Southern Illinois, Eastern Michigan, Fresno State and Indiana before getting his own program. Those shared experiences weren’t lost on either man in the build-up to this game.

But in the same way Alabama has (fairly or not) represented all the skepticism, mockery and criticism Indiana has endured these last two seasons, it is not the man, but the institution, Cignetti has the chance to prove himself against.

It was in the Rose Bowl — the stadium, just not the game itself — that Cignetti helped Saban win the first of those national titles, in 2009. Seventeen years later, the stage is the same, but for Cignetti, the opportunity something different.

Beating Alabama in the Rose Bowl settles a certain something forever.

Rose Bowl could lift IU football past upstart moment status

Painting history in such black-and-white terms is, of course, imprecise. The irony in the juxtaposition of programs in this game is not that Alabama wound up with an IU-built staff while Indiana hired a trusted old deputy of the man some Crimson Tide fans still pine for in the season’s leaner moments.

It is that, had the Hoosiers’ success continued apace five years ago, it’s not likely they would have been able to keep together then what Cignetti and athletic director Scott Dolson so masterfully have now.

That is the triumph of the last two years in Bloomington that’s missed amid SEC-country criticism.

There have been these upstart moments before, for programs like this one. Kansas rose as high as No. 2 in 2007, winning 12 games and the Orange Bowl. Northwestern reached the Rose Bowl in 1995 under Gary Barnett, and Purdue in 2000 under Joe Tiller.

What is different now — not just for Indiana but very possibly for Texas Tech, Vanderbilt and more — is that because of the money coursing through these Power Four programs, and because of the urgency attached to competitiveness in football in modern college athletics, the idea of IU football not just rising, but staying, is no longer fanciful.

That is what the old-money derision misunderstands, where the Finebaumian complaints about strength of schedule and media-day comments fall on deaf ears.

Indiana is a feature of modern college football, not a bug, and one worth celebrating.

At a time when so much else about college athletics is atrophying against the unquenchable thirst for money and the legal tide sweeping away all its outdated, amateur conventions, football offers a spark of hope.

Now, in what was for so long the most calcified of American sporting institutions, you can be anything.

Very well then. Alabama, with all its trophies and all its wins and all its history, in Pasadena, against these stakes and to claim this prize that forever represented Indiana’s impossible dream. One last dragon to slay.

After this season, the Rose Bowl’s Big Ten tie-in expires. Perhaps that’s fitting. We’ve torn down so much of what was once recognizable in college football. Let this be the last stand of the old ways.

Which is why it had to be like this: The program for so long synonymous with ineptitude and failure, against college football’s embodiment of excellence, for the retiring granddaddy of them all.

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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana vs Alabama football preview, Rose Bowl, Curt Cignetti, Kalen DeBoer

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