Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer is a legend in Sioux Falls, S.D.
Indiana coach Curt Cignetti and his father are household names in Indiana, Pa.
It was from relatively humble beginnings in those towns that Thursday’s Rose Bowl head coaches learned how to grind.
DeBoer starred as a receiver on the University of Sioux Falls football team before he later became its head coach. He went 67-3 at the NAIA school and won four straight national titles from 2005-09.
Cignetti saw his father, Frank, Sr., build a College Football Hall of Fame coaching career at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Curt left a comfortable assistant coaching job at Alabama to take the reins himself at IUP and went 53-17 at the Division II program from 2011-16.
Now they’ve got seemingly unlimited resources and both make more than $10 million per year. And coincidentally, along their respective journeys DeBoer and Cignetti made stops at the schools they’ll face on Thursday.
But before that, away from the glitz and glamour of the College Football Playoff and big money Power 4 schools, life as a football coach was much different for DeBoer and Cignetti.
“You have an appreciation for the resources and the things you have when you get to these levels of college football and these experiences,” DeBoer said Wednesday in Los Angeles ahead of the Rose Bowl.
“Being a small-college football coach, not even just a head coach, it really forces you to have to think outside the box, be creative, and that might be schematically, that might be how you set up your travel with limited expenses and things like that. So, there’s a lot, I think, that forces you to think through.”
Life is especially challenging for the assistant coaches as those lower levels.
Earlier this week Indiana defensive coordinator Bryant Haines, who was with Cignetti at IUP, said he lived in a house at the western Pennsylvania school for “young coaches that weren’t making a whole lot of money.”
Haines says the bathroom floor caved in the year after he moved out of that poor house. Now Haines is one of the highest-paid assistant coaches in college football.
But while short on resources, Sioux Falls and IUP provided patience. Both DeBoer and Cignetti say they were able to master the art of coaching by being at a place where the lights weren’t so bright.
“When I went to D-II, I came from Alabama, obviously. So for me, it was a chance to be the leader, and get the mistakes out of the way and improve your craft every year,” Cignetti said.
But going from Alabama to D-II required significant adjustments.
There were no fancy hotels, limited staffs, and limited technology.
“It was a culture shock, when you’re dressing in the shower up at Clarion for game day,” Cignetti said. “Playing in the playoffs and the university is shut down and you’re taking the garbage out before the staff meeting or waxing the staff table. Or maybe the university is changing their Internet system and you don’t have access to game tape until Tuesday of a Wednesday game.”
Cignetti can look back now and laugh about trials of being small college head coach. But he also knows his time at the lower levels of the sport made Thursday possible as he leads No. 1 Indiana against DeBoer’s No. 9 Alabama in front of around 100,000 fans at the Rose Bowl.
“Every move that I made, after I left Alabama, prepared me for this moment,” Cignetti said.
Cignetti and DeBoer are at the very top of the sport today.
Two of the highest-paid, most successful men in the business.
But it was lessons learned in Sioux Falls and the other Indiana that made it all possible.
And it all starts with a labor of love. Cignetti learned that from the more famous IUP head coach — the hall of famer who the field is named after.
“This business, you’ve got to love it,” Cignetti said. “My dad told me at a very young age, only go into it if you can’t live without it. And I think that was good advice. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
“I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.”
Except maybe once or twice while getting dressed in that shower at the Clarion.
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