MIAMI -- Indiana football's coaching search didn't end with a job offer.
It ended with a statement.
"Curt, you are going to be the next Indiana football coach and we're going to shock the world."
Indiana athletic director Scott Dolson delivered that message to Curt Cignetti when the James Madison coach picked up the phone on the night of Nov. 29, 2023.
Dolson spent the day alongside university president Pam Whitten flying from airport to airport interviewing three finalists for the job. They huddled together in a private room at one of those undisclosed destinations -- Dolson wouldn't reveal any of the airports they visited -- to talk over the candidates.
It was a brief discussion.
"We kind of knew that's where we were going to go," Dolson said in an interview with The Herald-Times.
While Dolson and Whitten finished their face-to-face sitdowns, Cignetti traveled back home to deliberate over what he would do if he was offered the job. He actually told his wife, Manette, he was considering staying at James Madison.
Cignetti viewed JMU as a "premier job" and had a lucrative contract extension on the table from the school that came with an increase to the salary pool for his staff. He loved Harrisonburg, Virginia, had strong support from the administration and a loaded roster coming back.
"They were going to make me the highest paid coach in the Sun Belt," Cignetti told The Herald-Times in a sitdown interview in 2024. "They couldn't pay me a lot early since they weren't getting the Sun Belt money yet."
When Cignetti fielded Dolson's call, his enthusiastic response left little doubt where his heart was at.
"He used some colorful language to say, 'Darn right we are,'" Dolson said.
Manette, who was in the room for the moment, joked about the call not going quite as they expected.
"He always teases me," Dolson said. "He kind of moved on in a way, but I didn't ask him, 'Would you be the next coach?' I said, 'You're going to be the next coach.' We actually talk about it a lot."
Indiana fans across the country are glad for it.
With the No. 1 Hoosiers (15-0) sitting on the doorstep of doing just what Dolson predicted, here's a look back at the 96-hours that changed the football program forever.
Indiana athletic director Scott Dolson had his own blueprint
Dolson watched the 2023 season unfold hoping then-coach Tom Allen would right the ship. He even expressed optimism midway through the year about Brendan Sorsby providing the team a possible spark.
To prep for both possibilities -- bringing Allen back, or searching for his replacement -- he tasked John Decker, the department's director of strategic communications, with doing a deep dive into IU's own recent history and how like programs in similar situations found success.
"You can't just, say, pump a bunch of money into the program. What does that even mean?" Dolson said. "Where does that go? What's the best way to strategically do it? What are things we can do to really impact winning, recruiting and development of players?"
Decker's research also formed the backbone of a candidate profile that guided Dolson throughout the search.
"We wanted to lay out a strategic plan for football," Dolson said. "Then, when we decided to make the change, we had a plan in place, knew the type of coach we are looking for and how we are going to support them. Coach Cig wouldn't have come here if we didn't show him we were all in this together."
Decker's research centered on North Carolina, Kansas, Duke, Kentucky, Illinois and Purdue, programs with basketball-rich traditions that were chosen during various brainstorming sessions with Dolson, Decker and deputy athletic director Stephen Harper.
They decided Decker should go back 25 years for each of those schools to see what trends he could identify during their periods of success.
Decker, an IU alum with a background in media relations and a love for numbers, is in his second stint working for the athletic department. He works on special projects in addition to his role coordinating communications at the administrative level for the athletic department.
"We looked at budgets, coaching staffs, turnover, do they have an offensive-minded coach, defensive-minded coach, can we extrapolate anything from that?" Decker said. "I just tried to pass on stuff that stood out."
One clear pattern that developed was how much of the success achieved by those programs was driven by offensive-minded head coaches, with standout quarterbacks. The most prominent recent example at the time was Kansas coach Lance Leipold.
In 2023, Leipold led the Jayhawks to a nine-win season and their first bowl win in 15 years, with quarterback Jalon Daniels earning All-Big 12 honors.
"In a way it's such an obvious thing, whether it's high school, college or the NFL," Decker said. "If you are going to be successful, you need good quarterback play, but if you looked at those schools you could see that their highs were just a little higher with the right quarterback."
The final report Decker gave to Dolson had sections on each of those teams along with other data the department gathered on their organizational structure and financial resources.
Dolson developed a profile that emphasized experienced head coaches with an offensive background and history of working with quarterbacks. He also wanted someone with a track record of recruiting and developing talent at a high level.
Indiana football coach Curt Cignetti makes an impression from Zoom to the tarmac
Cignetti jumped right into his core coaching philosophy -- a mantra IU fans have become plenty familiar with -- the first time he spoke with Dolson.
"One play at a time, six seconds a play," Cignetti said. "Every play has got a life and a history of its own. Play every play like it's 0-0. Don't be affected by success or failure."
Dolson actually started rattling some of Cignetti’s most commonly used refrains while recalling the moment.
It was a meaningful exchange for Dolson, who was a student manager under Bob Knight. Cignetti sounded a lot like the hall of fame coach while breaking down the foundation of his winning blueprint.
"I love that, those things are just so simple but so true," Dolson said. "Getting a team to execute, that's what I grew up with under coach Knight. You execute every offensive and defensive possession. It's how he operated. Cig was like, 'That's how you do it.'"
That call took place the day after the 2023 regular season ended.
Dolson went from having separate meetings with Allen and the team into a lengthy to-do list. He had a series of conversations with agents, coaching candidates and colleagues -- Indiana hired search firm TurnkeyZRG to help facilitate the search -- but it was his initial 45-minute chat with Cignetti that ultimately made the biggest impression.
He shared that sentiment with multiple people in the athletic department that night. The additional interviews he had with Cignetti only reinforced his high opinion of the coach who checked all the boxes in the profile IU developed.
While the search process unfolded, Cignetti’s players back at JMU mostly heard whispers about him being a candidate at Indiana from fans trying to track flights and rumors on social media.
"I don't think anybody expected him to leave or come here, but sure glad he did," Indiana linebacker Aiden Fisher said on Wednesday.
Cignetti sailed through a round of Zoom interviews that Dolson had with eight candidates before landing one of those in-person sit-downs. Face-to-face meetings took place at various airports across the country away from Bloomington and the respective home base of each finalist to maintain a level of secrecy.
Cignetti batted lead-off.
"I met him out on the tarmac and we walked back together to the room," Dolson said this week. "I distinctly remember shaking his hand and thinking, 'This is the guy.' It felt right. He just had a presence about him."
The meeting provided Whitten a chance to talk with Cignetti directly for the first time about his coaching style, schematic influences, and recruiting acumen. She told The Herald-Times after IU's victory over Ohio State in the Big Ten title game that Cignetti’s long history of identifying (and developing) assistant coaches and players really stood out amongst the field.
After notifying the necessary parties, Dolson made the call that set Indiana on a path to the 2026 title game in Miami.
"Coach Cignetti ended up having the best of everything," Decker said. "He had been at places where he inherited difficult situations, and the idea of the challenges Indiana might or might not have didn't scare him off. Right away, Scott saw his confidence and knew there was something different about him."