Curt Cignetti reveals how Nick Saban impacted his evaluation process

Monday’s national championship game will feature two coaches, Indiana‘s Curt Cignetti and Miami‘s Mario Cristobal, who are Nick Saban coaching disciples. Both have spoken at length in the past about how arguably the greatest college football coach of all-time has impacted their careers.

Cignetti is known for his ability to evaluate talent even without a star rating attached — and that’s something he learned from Saban, he said. Ahead of the national championship game, Cignetti went in-depth on how Saban helped teach him recruiting philosophies even to this day. He gave a look inside the longtime Alabama coaches mind and how he used to evaluate players.

“When I was with Nick (Saban),” Cignetti said, “there was an evaluation sheet, and supposedly when he was with (Bill) Belichick at the Browns, he had sort of come up with a sheet, or had a large impact on that, ankle, knee, hip flexibility, toughness at every position. Ankle stiffness, hip stiffness, knee stiffness, fatal flaws, start-stop game, generate explosion from those three facets of your lower body. That would be the biggest things.

“From a personal standpoint, I learn from my mistakes, and I think most of us that aspire to achieve at a high level either learn from our mistakes or we don’t progress.”

Cignetti said that when he was younger, he saw no issue with taking what Cignetti calls “potential guys,” or highly-rated recruits. “We had to,” he said. When he was a grad assistant at Pittsburgh (1983–1984), “we didn’t have much.”

Coaching at a program that wasn’t particularly attractive to recruits, he had to learn to evaluate early. By the time he was in Tuscaloosa just over two decades later, Cignetti got to see the other side of the coin — highly-rated players recruited through specific qualities.

“To me, there’s a lot to be said about what the guy is made of, his intangibles and his moldability or coachability,” he said. “What kind of teammate he’s going to be. You still have to have a certain level, obviously, of athleticism to be successful at the P4 level and the Big Ten.

“But you get the right group of guys together that combine as a team and they’re good decision-makers, they’re good people, because you’ve got to make decisions on the football field, too, and you’ve got to play with discipline and you’ve got to play with poise and you’ve got to play with confidence and consistency and have day-in/day-out consistency to a high standard and expectation.”

So far, this year’s Indiana team has done just that. Still, his team understands the job isn’t finished.