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"They’re the Best Team in College Football—and They Barely Practice at All
Indiana went from one of college football’s losingest schools to the top team in the country. And it didn’t take endless hours on the practice field to get there.When Curt Cignetti coached Indiana to an upset win over Ohio State on Saturday for the school’s first Big Ten title since before the moon landing, the most shocking thing wasn’t that he’d built the sad-sack Hoosiers into a champion in the space of just two years.
It’s that the most improbable turnaround in college football history took even less time than you thought.
Instead of endless hours on the practice field and a grueling regimen of drills, Cignetti’s Indiana team has reached the pinnacle of the game by hardly practicing at all.
In a sport that caps practice time at a maximum of 20 hours per week, the Hoosiers typically use just six of those on the field. Walk-throughs before and after games are barely as long as an episode of “The Office.” Even Cignetti’s most arduous sessions fall well short of the two-hour mark.
“I’ve always been a short practice guy,” Cignetti said. “My practices have probably gotten even shorter through the years, as we do everything we can to prepare the team fully but keep them fresh and healthy.”
This is all part of Cignetti’s “work smarter, not harder” philosophy that is shaking up college football. Outside of Bloomington, no other coach would ever consider leaving a single minute of practice time unused. They equate high performance with extreme preparedness.
But for players who work under Cignetti, the approach couldn’t be more different. When Myles Price transferred to Indiana from Texas Tech, he came from a program where workouts were designed to mimic the Navy SEALs. For one exercise in Lubbock, players were required to report to a swimming pool at 5 a.m.
“We got on these cotton sweatshirts and cotton sweatpants,” he recalled. “Gotta go underwater, take off the cotton sweatshirts to switch with your partner and they put it on.”
“It had nothing to do with football,” added Price, now of the Minnesota Vikings.
At Indiana, no one is disrobing underwater to become a better football player. In fact, almost no one is doing any tackling. Practices focus more on brain than brawn, emphasizing the strategy, reads and fine-tuned execution that might decide close games.
“I probably hit the ground my whole time in Indiana like two times,” said Price. “I felt amazing.”
Pulling back on practice has paid historic dividends. Before Cignetti arrived in Bloomington in 2023, the Hoosiers weren’t just also-rans. They were the single losingest program in the history of top-level college football. Now, in his second year at the helm, they’ve capped off an undefeated regular season to earn the top seed in the College Football Playoff.
But the most remarkable thing about Cignetti’s less-is-more practice philosophy is that he came up under the tutelage of the sport’s most demanding taskmaster: Nick Saban. Cignetti was one of Saban’s first hires at Alabama in 2007 as the team’s receivers coach and recruiting coordinator. He spent four seasons in Tuscaloosa, including the perfect 2009 campaign that ended with a national title.
It was there that Cignetti practically earned a doctorate in “The Process,” Saban’s patented, detail-obsessed method for turning the Tide into a dynasty. In Saban’s system, even the tiniest elements of the game are drilled and drilled until the team becomes a championship-winning machine.
When Cignetti took over his own programs—at Division II Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and then at Elon and James Madison University—he tried to run practices as hard as his former boss. But he soon came to realize that Saban-style drudgery could be counterproductive. Players were frequently unavailable on game days because they picked up so many injuries in practice.
So Cignetti put his own spin on The Process: Drill to the point of proficiency, and not a second more.
“I just believe in keeping people fresh and healthy,” Cignetti said. “The better people feel physically, the better they feel mentally, too.”
For most of the season, Indiana’s mentally fresh players have torched their opponents. Fernando Mendoza, a Heisman Trophy finalist, led the country in passing touchdowns. The Hoosiers won 10 of their 13 games by double digits, with an average margin of victory of 31.1 points.
But when they found themselves in a three-point game on Saturday with a chance to win their first Big Ten championship since 1967, they were ready for it. Cignetti’s practices—light on tackling, but heavy on information—had prepared them for precisely this eventuality.
“We’ve put ourselves in very stressful situations and the scenarios that have played out in these games, final two minutes, a lot of times,” linebacker Aiden Fisher said. “In practice.”
