How Indiana’s Curt Cignetti and 13 other first-year coaches built

• Max Olson, ESPN Personnel WriterOct 18, 2024, 07:00 AM ET

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  • Covers the Big 12
  • Joined ESPN in 2012
  • Graduate of the University of Nebraska

Throughout his very first 20 days at Indiana, Curt Cignetti did not see much daylight.Indiana athletic director Scott Dolson sent the plane to get his new coach on Dec. 1. What Cignetti and his staff discovered upon landing in Bloomington was a roster crisis. Nineteen scholarship players were currently in the transfer portal, consisting of 13 who ‘d started. They had 3 weeks to rebuild a Big 10 team.Cignetti drove to work in the dark before 5 a.m. He ‘d usually work out of his new workplace till 11 p.m. One night, it was 12:30. “Haven’t done that given that 1986, “he joked. He was happy that, at 63, he could still do it. The process of assembling the 2024 Hoosiers required an incalculable amount of film, call and coffee.”It was pedal to the metal, full-steam ahead,”Cignetti said.Cignetti was one of 14 new head coaches hired by Power 4 programs this offseason. Each one handled transfer attrition to some degree. None of them lost more than Indiana, with 37 scholarship players eventually departing after the firing of Tom Allen.But every job comes with different scenarios. Some are positioned for instantaneous success and some are at all-time low. Listed below we’ll information how Cignetti restored the Indiana lineup and how the other 13 Power 4 first-year coaches did also. We have actually tiered each roster construction.Jump to a tier: Plug and play Start from scratch The in-between-ers Portal minimalists