Indiana walked out of Lincoln with its unbeaten record still alive, but Curt Cignetti made sure nobody mistook Saturday for a clean escape. The Hoosiers had to claw back from a double-digit fourth-quarter hole before beating Nebraska 20-17, and their coach spent much of his postgame press conference laying out just how rough it was for long stretches.
Nebraska owned the first half, and Cignetti didn’t bother polishing that reality. “Nebraska played great. They dominated us,” he said.
At halftime, the message in the Indiana locker room was about resetting, not panicking. Cignetti said the Hoosiers had to regroup and move past the first 30 minutes, save for the corrections that came with them.
“The biggest thing is we just settled down,” Cignetti said. “We got them settled down at halftime.
Took a deep breath, forgot the first half - except for the corrections and adjustments.”
Indiana eventually steadied itself, and the defense began to look more like the reliable unit Cignetti’s program has leaned on. Even so, the coach was blunt about the film waiting for him on Sunday.
“There’s going to be a lot of things we don’t like on tape,” Cignetti said. “I’ll tell you that right now.”
What he liked was the response. Saturday wasn’t pretty, but Indiana found a way through it, and Cignetti framed that as a matter of toughness as much as execution.
“You have to have an indomitable will,” Cignetti said. “A will that cannot be defeated or subdued.
You have to be resilient and have the ability to overcome the unexpected.”
That resilience showed up in key moments, especially on the play that helped swing the game in the fourth quarter. On fourth-and-1 near midfield, Josh Hoover read Nebraska selling out to stop the run and hit a receiver over the middle for a long touchdown. Cignetti praised the quarterback’s handling of the moment: “He had great poise, presence and was calm and delivered a strike.”
Hoover also continues to separate himself with efficiency. Cignetti noted that he has 17 touchdown passes without an interception this season and called that “not bad.”
Indiana’s ground game never found much room. The Hoosiers managed only 66 yards on 22 carries after running wild against Rutgers the week before, and Cignetti said Nebraska’s plan made that an issue from the outset.
“Early on it was obvious they were committed to stopping the run. We really never quite got the run game going.
I thought we'd run the ball better than we did.”
That lack of balance forced Indiana to survive in less comfortable ways, and some of the fourth-down decisions reflected that reality. Rather than pressing the issue with an offense that wasn’t finding a rhythm, Cignetti chose to punt in several situations where the Hoosiers had briefly considered being aggressive. He owned those calls afterward.
“A lot of them were maybe, God, I just wanted to go for it,” Cignetti said. “We weren't getting anything done [offensively] and the clock is running down, let's just survive it.
Let's stop the bleeding. Punt the ball.
Those were all on me.”
It wasn’t the kind of game Indiana has gotten used to under Cignetti, but it was one his team still managed to finish with a win. And in his telling, that was the point. “Good teams find a way to win a game like this at the end,” Cignetti said.
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