Nick Saban's forgotten disciple: What Curt Cignetti took with him from Alabama to Indiana

On the field at one of his first Alabama football practices, Kevin Garver let a yawn sneak out of his mouth. 

The Alabama student assistant soon had an assistant coach coming over with a message for him. 

"Don't ever let the head coach see you yawn at practice," Curt Cignetti told him. 

It wasn't Cignetti trying to be a jerk but rather emphasizing that even the tiniest of details mattered, especially to a hard-charging head coach like Nick Saban, who long-time assistants swore never coughed or yawned in their years of working with him. Cignetti, then Alabama's receivers coach and recruiting coordinator, was trying to help his players and coaches prioritize the little things that could help them become their best versions. 

For Garver, little moments like that helped power him through a career that included coaching the wide receivers on a Super Bowl-winning Tampa Bay Buccaneers staff under Bruce Arians. 

"I was very green, and I didn't know anything, and he took me under his wing and allowed me to work with him and assist with the receivers," Garver told CBS Sports. "It was the first time I had ever worked with receivers, so it was the genesis of my coaching career at that position. There's still a lot of things I use today in my coaching journey that I learned from him." 

Long before leading undefeated No. 8 Indiana (9-0) in what could be the story of this 2024 college football season, Cignetti was closely watching college football's greatest coach and preparing for what he'd do when he finally got a shot at the big chair one day. That Indiana is a 14-point favorite over defending national champion Michigan this weekend (3:30 p.m., ET on CBS) speaks to how well he did in that department.

Cignetti, the son of former West Virginia head coach Frank Cignetti Sr., had been around football all his life. He knew what it was like to be a leader and what big-time college football was like as a Mountaineers quarterback. He had had a successful coaching career before getting to Alabama, including NC State where he mentored quarterback Philip Rivers and helped recruit Russell Wilson, but it was in Tuscaloosa from 2007-10 that Cignetti mastered the attention-to-detail prowess that separated Saban from his peers. 

Those first couple of years at Alabama were challenging for everyone involved. The staff was largely new and hadn't worked for Saban before, and the pace of getting the Crimson Tide back on top was unrelenting. If you couldn't keep up with Saban's work ethic, organization, and precise attention to detail, even on seemingly the most minute things, you wouldn't last long. 

"(Saban) was so well versed in how he wanted things, where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do that I know the first year had to be brutal for him," a former staffer told me for my book The Leadership Secrets of Nick Saban: How Alabama's Coach Became the Greatest Ever. "He had some friends around him, but largely, he was surrounded by strangers in a different environment. He knew where he wanted to take everything but he had to do it all over again with a lot of different people for the first time."

In a sink-or-swim environment, Cignetti flourished. There was a quiet confidence in the veteran coach who could withstand Saban's demanding style and knew how to teach the finer points of receiving that would make his head coach happy. However, his most important job for the recruiting-obsessed Saban may have been as recruiting coordinator. Long before the days of general managers and directors of recruiting, an assistant coach had the double duty of organizing the recruiting efforts. 

Burton Burns, Alabama's running backs coach from 2007-17, remembers Cignetti excelling in that role because of how organized he was. 

"He was knowledgeable about recruiting and knew everybody on the board because he was sending us out," Burns told CBS Sports. "He was built for the job, it was in his DNA. He knew how to do all those things. He was really good on the road. I went on the road a few times with him, and he was really good with coaches and the family of those kids."

Cignetti was the lead recruiter for a player who would later make Burns very happy: Future Heisman Trophy-winning running back Mark Ingram. Cignetti got Alabama in the game late for Ingram, who would become Alabama's first Heisman winner and a big part of its 2009 title team. It's unclear if he told Ingram to just Google Saban in order to get him on board.

One of the unique challenges at talent-stacked places like Alabama is managing a room full of players who not only were the best on their high school team but probably the best in their county, state and maybe even nationally. It's a delicate balance of managing egos of alpha personalities to keep everyone pulling in the same direction. On those run-heavy early Alabama teams, it was even more challenging knowing you had to get receivers bought into blocking and only getting a handful of targets, at best, during the game. 

"I always thought he did a good job because his position was very dependable," Burns said. 

It helped that he had a receiver named Julio Jones in that room. The ballyhooed five-star recruit looked ready to compete the minute he arrived on campus and quickly earned respect from older teammates for his work ethic in the weight room and on the practice field. The 6-foot-3, 220-pound Jones was naturally gifted and one of the greatest receivers to ever come through Tuscaloosa, but Cignetti coached him like all of the other guys. There was no special treatment and it was all about giving him little pointers to help him improve. 

Garver, a young student assistant during Julio's time in Tuscaloosa, got a chance to coach him again with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2022. While acknowledging how easy it was to coach Jones because of the professional way he did everything, he could still see the impact Cignetti had on the star receiver a decade later. 

"It was more of the finer details of playing the position -- top of the routes, releases, aggressive hands -- those kind of things, I think it was great for Julio to have Cignetti as his first coach in college," said Garver who is now an offensive analyst at UAB. "Extremely detailed, extremely organized, it's going to be drilled, there's going to be tape involved." 

Alabama Crimson Tide coaching staff, 2007 (Saban's first season)

Saban recently told a story on College GameDay about his alma mater, Kent State, calling him in 2010 and asking him if he had any recommendations for its head coaching position. The Alabama head coach asked his staff if anyone would be interested, and the first one to raise his hand was Cignetti. It was an outward expression of quiet confidence that everyone on those early Alabama staffs noticed about him. 

"It brought me back immediately because I was in that staff meeting," said Mike Vollmar, who served as Alabama's director of football operations from 2008-2010. "He talked about Curt's confidence, and he's exactly right. His hand went up immediately regarding that job."

Cignetti even talked to Garver about whether he'd be interested in joining him at Kent State if he got the job. Cignetti interviewed for the position but Kent State ultimately hired Ohio State receivers coach Darrell Hazell. 

For years, schools have raced to hire Saban disciples in hopes of capturing a piece of the magic that powered six national championships over 17 seasons in Tuscaloosa. Schools badly wanted to replicate Saban's famous "Process," and dozens of former assistants have gotten head coaching jobs, at least in part because of their association with the former Alabama head coach. 

Cignetti has been the forgotten disciple because of an arduous, winding path that took him out of college football's spotlight. Unlike later Saban assistants like Kirby Smart (Georgia) and Jeremy Pruitt (Tennessee), who jumped into prominent Power Four jobs, Cignetti left Alabama for Division II IUP. Less than a year after helping Alabama win its first national championship under Saban, Cignetti took a 60 percent pay cut to take over a program that was all but in a different solar system compared to what he experienced in Tuscaloosa. 

The move felt curious at the time, even with Cignetti's family ties to IUP (his father previously coached the school for nearly 20 years) but those on Alabama's staff weren't surprised. 

"His ambition was to be a head coach," Burns said. "You could tell, like all of us in the early years of Nick being at Alabama, he was learning. He was very astute in understanding organization and how Nick set up his program. I think that was his master plan to eventually become a head coach."

Cignetti began the slow path up the college football totem pole. He spent six seasons at IUP, winning 53 out of 70 games and guiding the Crimson Hawks to multiple playoff appearances. From there it was two winning seasons at FCS school Elon before replacing Mike Houston at James Madison. Cignetti was a smash success at the FCS power, taking it to the championship game in his first year and shepherding it through its FBS transition. He led one of the best stories in college football last season when he guided the Dukes to a 10-0 start that featured a College GameDay appearance on campus. He finally got his first Power Four head coaching opportunity at 62-years old and at a place no one would consider a traditional power. 

"I admire him for the path he's taken," said Vollmar, who is now senior director of capital improvement and projects at Kansas. "You can't be successful like that unless you're driven."

Said Saban recently on GameDay: "I think he's been a good coach for a long time. He just had success at programs that, whether they were Division II, [Division] 1-AA, people didn't pay that much attention to. But if you evaluate his success rate, it was very, very good."

Indiana's historic 2024 season by the numbers

When Burns watches Cignetti's undefeated Indiana team, it's reminiscent of the early Alabama teams that Saban and Co. painstakingly built that took over the sport.

"They are well prepared, they don't make a whole lot of mistakes and there's a little chip on their shoulder as they're playing," he said. "I remember us being that way. This was Nick's Process, if you will, and I do see that in Indiana's team."