No Delusion – Belief Fuels Indiana Record-Setting Season
Pete DiPrimio | IUHoosiers.com
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. - Delusional? Aiden Fisher concedes that with a smile. No risk, no glory? Indiana’s standout linebacker bought into that, as well.
“To be successful,” Fisher says from a Don Croftcheck Team Room podium at Merchants Bank Field at Memorial Stadium, “you have to be a little delusional. You have to buy into some things that maybe don’t seem will come true, but if you believe enough, they will.”
Fisher is on the winning side of that belief. He’s a first-team All-American and the leader of one of the nation’s best defenses on America’s only remaining unbeaten team and the No. 1 seed in the playoffs.
Fisher is a Hoosier because head coach Curt Cignetti offered him, just as Cignetti had done at James Madison when Fisher was a promising Virginia Riverbend High School prospect versatile enough to earn postseason quarterback honors as a junior and more honors as a senior at linebacker and running back.
When Cignetti took the Indiana job, he wanted Fisher to join him. Cignetti had led James Madison into top-25 recognition and saw even bigger things at IU despite its tradition as major college football’s losingest program.
“We went through the schedule that first year,” Fisher says. “We looked at every game. We knew the challenges. We talked about the roster we could get, how confident he was that this would come true.”
IU split with Ohio State (the eventual national champion) and Michigan that first year, and beat everyone else, often by blowout, including a ranked Nebraska team, before a season-ending first-round playoff loss to eventual national runner-up Notre Dame.
Road losses to college football’s two best teams would have satisfied most coaches and programs. Not Cignetti and the Hoosiers. It set the foundation for this season’s 13-0, Big Ten title-winning run.
“I’ve heard (Cignetti) say he was a year late in his (championship) prediction,” Fisher says, “but the belief he had in himself and the program, it was easy to buy into that and believe in him after he showed me what he could do at JMU in two years.”
The Hoosiers will face ninth-seed Alabama (11-3) in a Jan. 1 quarterfinal showdown at the Rose Bowl. The Crimson Tide have 16 official national titles, and two more unofficial ones. IU has none, with a best national ranking finish of fourth in 1945 and 1968.
But those Hoosier teams didn’t have Cignetti and a talented veteran coaching staff that includes offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan and defensive coordinator Bryant Haines who, despite fewer four- and five-star recruits than nearly every other playoff team, inspired the discipline, execution and collective belief necessary to do what needs to be done.
“Having (Cignetti) at the head of this has been phenomenal,” Fisher says. “Two years looking at it, you had to buy into that delusion that we would be the team.”
Center Pat Coogan shares that delusion. It’s why he transferred from Notre Dame to IU after the Irish’s national title run, why he was such a big part of the Hoosiers’ tough-minded, fourth-quarter efforts in victories at Iowa, at Oregon, at Penn State, and then against Ohio State in the Dec. 6 Big Ten title game.
“As a competitor, those big moments are what you play for,” he says, “the Iowas, the Oregons, the Penn States. As an offensive lineman, you take pride in those moments and having success in those gotta-have-it moments.”
Coogan reflects on his own recruiting conversation with Cignetti.
“One of the first things Coach Cig said to me when he called me in the transfer portal was he needed a guy who can shine in those big moments. Collectively, we’ve done our hardest to do that.
“We still have a long way to go and a lot of room to improve. That’s the exciting part. We have this time (since beating Ohio State) to improve. We’re happy we can be successful.”