Indiana football coach Curt Cignetti allowed himself to smile for the first time all day during a brief postgame interview with CBS sideline reporter Jenny Dell.
Cignetti’s team had just closed out a 20-15 victory over a Michigan team that was the defending national champion and spent decades bullying the Hoosiers.
On Saturday, IU was the bully with a defense that took on the take-no-prisoners attitude of its coach and held the Wolverines to a season-low 206 yards, the team’s fewest since a loss to Iowa on Nov. 12, 2016. It also stopped a would-be game-tyingtwo2-point conversion in the fourth quarter and forced Michigan to settle for a field goal after Kurtis Rourke threw an interception at the 7-yard line.
No. 8 Indiana (10-0; 7-0) made history by extending its best-ever start and winning double-digit games for the first time, but Cignetti’s smile was long gone by the time he stepped into the team room at Memorial Stadium for his postgame press conference.
While he took pride in the closeout of a one-score game in the fourth quarter — he described it as a “gutty” effort — he pushed back at a question about what it meant for the program.
“Here’s how I’m going to honestly answer that question: I’m glad we won. I don’t like the way we played,” Cignetti said.
Cignetti does allow players 24 hours to celebrate a win and he joked that he will allow himself a day off on Sunday as the team heads into a bye week, but it was easy to see what his focus will be when he turns on the film when he arrives at the office at 4 a.m. Monday.
“I’m not happy with the way we played, particularly on offense in the second half,” Cignetti said. “We’ve got to take a good look at the film Monday and see what happens. I thought special teams overall was fairly solid. There were a couple kickoff returns that game out on their bench, but it looked like maybe we were getting grabbed on them. But I thought our defense did a number of good things, but they were on the field too long.”
Cignetti jokingly said the team wouldn’t help IU’s “BCS” rankings, but he was only half-kidding. He wants those style points and it’s that question for perfection that has laid the groundwork for the team’s success this season.
“I think this team understands that no matter — we can find a way to get it done, but I think if you polled them, they would all prefer to execute at a much higher level and score more points,” Cignetti said.
