Alabama set to face Indiana, former Crimson Tide assistant Curt Cignetti in Rose Bowl
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Alabama didn’t blink when it faced a 17-0 deficit, on the road, in primetime on Friday night, with its season on the line.
Instead, it got off the canvas and stormed back, punching all the way to a 34-24 victory over Oklahoma in a first-round all-SEC battle in Norman. And because of its hard work, its season will stretch until at least New Year’s Day, when it will get its shot at a former Bama assistant who’s been making a few headlines in the Midwest lately.
That would be Curt Cignetti, who is 143-37 as a head coach and has Indiana, of all programs, sitting on top of the sport going into this College Football Playoff. The Hoosiers are 13-0, so Alabama will be aiming to ruin that perfection and ruin Cignetti’s unfathomable pursuit of leading Indiana to its first national championship. Cignetti will have Bama in his way this time, a program he spent 5 years with as a wide receivers coach from 2007-11.
Right after he left Tuscaloosa, Cignetti started the business of winning and winning big as a head coach. He began at tiny IUP, then went to Elon, followed by James Madison and then to Bloomington, where he’s fully blossomed into an architect of winning football games.
All of this will add up to a really juicy subplot, as Cignetti’s Hoosiers face off against the 9th-seeded Crimson Tide. It’ll be a fascinating matchup, considering the different histories of the 2 football programs, and it’ll be staged at a historical venue, the Rose Bowl, in a 4 p.m. ET kickoff on ESPN.
The backdrop will surely be beautiful, because it’s the Rose Bowl, and the backstory will be incredible, too, as a former Tide assistant who was there when Nick Saban started his run takes aim at Alabama some 18 years later.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
