Few football coaches can bridge their profession with basketball the way Cam Cameron can.
Even fewer can weave in an Indiana perspective.
A dual-sport athlete at Indiana, Cameron played football for the Hoosiers under Lee Corso, and basketball for Bob Knight.
Cameron went on to a more than 30-year college and professional football coaching career that included five years as the head coach at IU — in the seat now held by Curt Cignetti.
Cameron can’t help but notice similarities between the coaching styles of Cignetti and Knight.
“This is as big of a compliment that I can give a football coach,” Cameron told Rick Semmler on WTWO’s Beyond the Stands podcast. “He reminds me as a teacher and a communicator to players, and an ability to put together a comprehensive plan to beat the opponent — he’s Bob Knight in a lot of ways.
“I listen to him talk, and the one thing that you love about guys like Curt or Coach Knight, is there’s no gray area, especially when you’re a young male — you just need clarity sometimes. And if you don’t like it, some of the greatest things we learn initially we don’t like. He’s not afraid to say it like it is, and guys respond to that. Alpha football players love clarity.
“I’d put Cignetti up there, having studied him now quite a bit and having heard about him for a long period of time, he’s as good as any football coach in America.”
Cameron said he doesn’t know the current IU coach but had heard about Cignetti for years through his former IU offensive coordinator Hal Hunter, who coached under Cignetti’s father Frank at IU Pennsylvania, and was on the Pittsburgh staff in 1983-84 when Curt was a grad assistant there.
Cameron said his IU quarterback Antwaan Randle El was the greatest athlete he ever coached. But even with that generational talent behind center, he couldn’t find sustained success in Bloomington. He said watching Indiana’s 63-10 win over Illinois Saturday looked like what so many IU football coaches before and after him strived to attain.
“I watched that game the other night against Illinois, and here’s what I said to myself. ‘Every single football coach that took the job at Indiana, that’s what they envisioned,'” Cameron said.
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