Indiana is Mistake-Free and College Football's Best Team. Curt Cignetti's Standard is Why.

ATLANTA — For 12 seconds, the smile didn’t leave Curt Cignetti’s face.

Indiana football’s 64-year-old coach, the architect of the sport’s most improbable turnaround, eyed the glass, football-shaped Peach Bowl trophy, grabbed it on both ends and hoisted it overhead.

Cheers from the heavily crimson-clad crowd loudened. Players, sporting newly acquired hats and T-shirts acknowledging their latest big-game victory, pumped their fists and raised their arms after the Hoosiers’ 56–22 victory over No. 5 Oregon on Friday night in Atlanta.

Suddenly, confetti filled the air within Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which resembled a snow globe with cream and crimson-colored paper mache floating through the air.

By now, No. 1 Indiana has become used to this — used to drubbing top 10 opponents, used to taking over stadiums outside Bloomington, used to throwing parties grander than it ever could’ve dreamed.

And, by and large, the Hoosiers are used to playing 60 minutes during which they refuse to beat themselves — because they’re so focused on earning the right to smile, and celebrate, together.

“It starts from the top down,” Indiana sixth-year senior safety Louis Moore said. “See, I mean, everybody knows Coach Cig, how he operates. You probably still see it. He probably didn’t smile the whole game. He's always serious.”

Except — an ever-important exception — when the clock hits zero, when Cignetti is cleared to lift trophies, when he’s in position to savor a confetti-filled shower. But that only comes after college football’s second-losingest program plays another near-perfect game.

Indiana is top five nationally in penalties committed and penalty yards compiled per game. The Hoosiers are the best team in the nation in turnover margin. They rarely misfit gaps or bust coverages. Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Fernando Mendoza has more touchdown passes (eight) than incomplete passes (five) in two College Football Playoff games thus far.

The Hoosiers are college football’s last unbeaten, and they’re chasing the first 16–0 season since Yale in 1894. It’s the ultimate mark of perfection — and the ultimate reflection of Cignetti’s mentality trickling down to his team.

“He’s strict on everything,” junior safety Amare Ferrell said. “Alignments, stance — he makes sure everything’s down to a T. So, when you practice like that day in, day out, it kind of just becomes a habit at this point. So, I feel like that's why we play so mistake free.”

Indiana redshirt junior receiver Omar Cooper Jr. echoed the same sentiment.

“He tries to make sure we’re on our Ps & Qs, we know what we’re doing,” Cooper said. “And then just how we prepare — we study, we make sure we don't get many opportunities to mess up. So, the game plan we have and how we practice is what makes it so many less mistakes.”

Indiana never gives self-inflicted wounds. Oregon needed only one play to start digging its own grave. Redshirt sophomore quarterback Dante Moore ran a quick-game run/pass option, and he targeted receiver Malik Benson on an out route to the left side of the formation.

D’Angelo Ponds, Indiana’s All-American junior cornerback, jumped the route and returned it 25 yards for a touchdown. The Ducks responded with a 14-play, 75-yard touchdown drive, but they fell victim to their own demise.

Moore lost two fumbles. Indiana blocked a punt. Oregon didn’t score for nearly 30 minutes after its first touchdown. The Hoosiers, meanwhile, scored 35 unanswered points.

"They have a great defense, great disguise and different looks, but you can't win football games if you're causing turnovers," Moore said. "Indiana is great, but at the end of the day, we beat ourselves."

To beat Indiana requires near perfection, because the Hoosiers won’t make mistakes. It adds another layer of pressure to opposing teams, who play themselves as much as the nation’s No. 1 team. Together, the two factors culminate in a sandstorm that’s swept away every challenger.

“I feel like that's what makes us a great team,” junior safety Amare Ferrell said. “When a team makes a mistake, it's hard to come back from a mistake playing us. At the end of the day, we can't make mistakes in order to win. Like Coach Cig says all the time, those mistakes can lose us games, so just eliminate them so we can win games.”

The formula sounds so simple, so straightforward, but Indiana is the nation’s only team to master it. The Hoosiers, sophomore defensive lineman Mario Landino said, have tremendous schemes and the players to adapt. They’re smart, they listen and they have the depth to overcome injuries.

All told, Indiana is the best team in college football. Cooper said he believes it, several other players acknowledged it.

The Hoosiers have been on a mission this year to prove they belong, to prove last season wasn’t a fluke, to prove, with no doubt, they’re the nation’s best. They already proved it to themselves many moons prior, and they’re relishing the chance to show it to the rest of the country.

“We all see the potential to win a national championship,” Moore said. “We seen it a long time ago. So, we just got to be the best version of ourselves and we hold each other to a high standard.”

The process starts with Cignetti, who’s so regimented, so habitual, he’s ingrained such a standard into his program. Cignetti acknowledged his players heard the skepticism that Indiana was a fluke last season — much of which, he said, came from people who don’t really know what the Hoosiers are made of and who they have on the roster.

But doubt didn’t dissuade Indiana from sitting at the adult's table. It fueled a greater passion to pull up a chair. Now, the Hoosiers are one win away — defeating No. 10 Miami on Jan. 19 in the national championship game — from holding the right to the king’s throne.

“Great leaders, great players,” Cignetti said. “And we've just built off our successes, and we've won some big games on the road, and it helps when you have a quarterback play his best football when the game is on the line in the fourth quarter. So, here we are.”

Ferrell knew during fall camp the Hoosiers had a better team than the year before. Cooper realized after Indiana’s 63–10 win over then-No. 9 Illinois the Hoosiers could be the best team in America, and after consecutive road wins at Iowa and Oregon, he concluded Indiana could be special if it made the right strides.

The Hoosiers, by all accounts, have. And they have a suddenly rampant collection of confetti to prove it.

“This team's really special,” Cooper said. “We’re all really close on offense and defense. This was our goal at the end of the year. We’re not gonna say it, but everybody that plays football, their goal is to be national champions.

“Now that we’re one game away, it just shows our special this team is, how good of a group of guys that we have in this locker room and the leadership that we have on our team. It's crazy. And now we just got to go finish it off.”

Such was the mentality within the Hoosiers’ locker room after Friday night’s 34-point drubbing. They know the stigma of their past will forever follow them into the future, but they pay no mind to it.

Their focus rests on competing for one another, on bringing a championship trophy to Bloomington, on fulfilling the mission they set out to achieve months before anyone else believed.

“We’re fighting for something bigger than ourselves,” senior right tackle Kahlil Benson said postgame. “It’s ball against ball, players against players, grit against grit. We proved it tonight. Let the score prove it and let the work prove it and let the field prove it.

”Not too much to speak on that. We're here to do more than what we accomplished here today.”

There’s no complacency, no satisfaction and, 24 hours after the win, no celebration. Indiana still has a job to finish.

Each time the stage has grown bigger, the Hoosiers have stood taller. They’re one win away from mortality, one win away from completing the greatest story perhaps in the history of sports, and one win away from giving Cignetti another reason to smile.

Indiana needs to do nothing but be itself — because it’s proven to be the best team in the country. Now, the Hoosiers want the trophy to prove it.

“Even though it is the national championship, we don't have to do anything that is out of character,” Mendoza said. “We just got to play our brand of football, and that's what has led us to this point in 15 wins this season.”