Tino Sunseri spent only one year away from Indiana football before returning for his second stint as quarterbacks coach.
He departed to become UCLA’s offensive coordinator, a job he held for just four games before he and the program mutually agreed to part ways.
Sunseri missed a few things in Bloomington while he was gone.
The Hoosiers, of course, captured their first-ever national championship in 2025. They became the first college football team since the 1890s to go 16-0. And quarterback Fernando Mendoza won the program’s first-ever Heisman Trophy.
Sunseri had success with Kurtis Rourke in 2024, but Mendoza took it a few steps further with Chandler Whitmer. Whitmer left IU in February to become quarterbacks coach for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, creating the opening for Sunseri to return.
And while Sunseri, offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan, and head coach Curt Cignetti have all worked together before, Indiana’s returning quarterbacks coach had some catching up to do.
“I think you evolve every year, not only schematically but maybe in your processes. And we’ve evolved, certainly,” Cignetti said Thursday. “Tino’s first order of business was to learn the new stuff we did, because there’s things that we did last year that we didn’t do before, and there’s things that we’re not doing that we did two years ago. Then we’ll recreate some things again this year.”
Sunseri will now work with TCU transfer Josh Hoover to reach similar levels of success as Rourke and Mendoza.
But along with various offensive concepts changing over time, Indiana’s coaching philosophies and strategies have adapted as well.
Of course, players can respond differently to different coaching techniques, and Hoover isn’t a clone of Mendoza nor Rourke. But Cignetti is planning to continue using some things that Whitmer and Mendoza did last year, even with both the coach and player gone.
“There’s certainly some things that Chandler did with Mendoza, I thought, that really helped his development,” Cignetti said. “The virtual reality technology, for one. That’s something that we’re still doing, and I think it really helps a quarterback’s processing.”
Tyson Brown’s winding road
IU lost an important piece of its staff after the 2025 season when director of athletic performance Derek Owings left for a similar job at Tennessee, the day after the national championship game.
Cignetti hired Tyson Brown from UConn to fill the void, and Brown now plays a vital role for the program during spring ball and, particularly, over the summer between the end of spring practices and the start of fall camp.
This is the second time Cignetti has hired Brown; he added Brown to his staff at Elon after the 2017 season. But that was short-lived. Brown, at the time, was an assistant strength coach at Washington State under Mike Leach. Shortly into Brown’s time at Elon, WSU’s head strength coach left for an NFL job, which created an opportunity for Brown to return to the Cougars.
“After my first year at Elon I lost my strength guy,” Cignetti recalled. “(I) hired Tyson, who was the No. 2 guy at Washington State for Leach. He was on the job three weeks, and his wife and kids put everything in a U-Haul and drove cross country to Elon. They were 20 miles out when Mike Leach lost his strength guy to the Chicago Bears and called Tyson and offered him the job, making about four times more money.”
But now, years later, Cignetti finally got Brown on board.
And early reports are positive.
“I’ve gotten great feedback from the players and staff, too, on him,” Cignetti said. “Our kids at Elon loved him. He was interested in the job coming back, and I knew him, and he got good reviews, so he’s done a nice job.”
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