Indiana Hoosiers head coach Curt Cignetti is College Football's shining example of how to outthink and outscheme the enemy. Some feel his defensive coaching staff isn't playing by the rules, but that's a story for another day.
What Cignetti has built, culture-wise, has been the sport's standard this season, at 15-0, and with the CFP title game against the Miami Hurricanes looming. One SEC GM shared a statement that should resonate on the Plains after Alex Golesh's hire as the Auburn Tigers' headman, and especially in the wake of Hugh Freeze's firing.
"Whenever you're structuring a pro environment, you have to get a coach that's hungry, that wants to be in the office every day," an SEC general manager told CBS Sports' Brandon Marcello. "That permeates throughout the building. You're going to have a bunch of three-star guys, but they're going to overachieve because there's a system in place that's worked. There's a lot of buy-in. Everybody's pulling in the same direction.
"You have to be intentional about the characters you bring. You have to build."
Character and buying in matter. That was not the motto under Freeze the past two seasons, to say the least.
Auburn replacing on-paper talent with culture-first football under Alex Golesh
Plenty of legitimate future NFL talent is leaving the Plains via the transfer portal this offseason. Cam Coleman, Malcolm Simmons, Deuce Knight, and Eric Singleton Jr. are all likely future Sunday players. Their departures may end up being positives when it's all said and done, though.
Golesh is strategically building something with select USF Bulls transfers and a mix of big names from Power 4 programs.
The guys who won't be coming back were talented, but in many ways, manifested the problems in the locker room that resulted in losing seasons in 2024 and, especially, 2025. It's notable that some of the proudest AU alums in media won't be missing the guys who left.
The Tigers are not guaranteed to come close to replicating what Cignetti does. Cignetti may end up with an NFL factory in Bloomington, while Golesh and Joel Gordon run schemes best suited for the college game.
Still, that model is better than whatever was going on at the Woltosz Football Performance Center and in the locker rooms at Jordan-Hare Stadium the past few seasons.