Happy Tuesday,
In 1990, I went to a not-so-small college in Western Pennsylvania called Indiana University of Pennsylvania — IUP. Back then, I had a short-lived idea that I might try to walk on to the football team… right up until I saw what I was actually standing next to.
Coach Frank Cignetti (Curt’s father) had built IUP into an NCAA Division II powerhouse. The size. The dominance. The standard. It was obvious within minutes: I had some size, sure… but I lacked what mattered most at that age — drive. Not talent. Not heart. Drive. The kind that shows up early, stays late, and refuses to negotiate with excuses.
Fast forward: I graduated in 1996, life moved on, and what felt like “six degrees of separation” turned into one of those small-world connections you don’t fully appreciate in the moment. My roommate married into the Cignetti family — and back then, it didn’t feel like anything more than a small-world coincidence: two friends getting married. No big meaning. No big takeaway. Just life doing life.
And then, slowly… we watched Curt Cignetti do what very few people can do: win. Everywhere. Over and over again.
If you’ve followed college football at all this month, you already know the headline: Indiana went 16–0 and won the national title, beating Miami 27–21. And the coverage is right — it really does feel like something Hollywood would pitch, because even the AP recap leaned into it: “Maybe they’ll call it ‘Hoosiers.'”
But here’s what I want you to see through a business lens:
This wasn’t magic. This was a case study.
Cignetti has built winners at multiple levels — including a strong run at IUP itself (53–17), then Elon, then James Madison University, where he went 52–9 and helped build a powerhouse that many people in our Virginia region watched up close.
So when he arrives on a bigger stage and says something like, “I win. Google me,” it’s not hype. It’s a belief system.
And when Indiana finishes the job, his explanation isn’t complicated either:
“You do it with people and a plan.”
That sentence is basically an agent’s career in eight words.
The “portal” is just the marketplace
We can debate college football’s transfer portal all day — but from a business standpoint, it’s the marketplace showing up at scale.
Indiana didn’t win by chasing flash and “five-star” everything. Cignetti said it plainly after the game: this team didn’t have “eight first-round draft choices,” but “the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.”
Sound familiar?
That’s the agent who stops chasing the shiniest lead source and starts building a real foundation:
– a clear plan
– consistent follow-up
– a pipeline that doesn’t depend on mood
– relationships that compound over time
The Mendoza piece is the part I can’t stop thinking about
Indiana’s quarterback, Fernando Mendoza, put words to the thing most professionals feel at some point: being overlooked early.
He said, on the field after winning it all, that he was a “two-star recruit” and got a “declined walk-on offer” at Miami — and then he won the national championship in Miami.
That’s a belief. That’s patience. That’s finding the right system and the right environment — then doing the work.
Slowly… then suddenly
That’s what this story really is.
Not an overnight success. Not a lucky break. Not a one-season miracle.
It’s what happens when a leader brings a standard, builds the right staff, recruits the right fits, and runs the plan long enough for the results to finally look “sudden” to everyone watching from the outside.
And it’s also what happens when an agent decides:
– I’m going to stop being random
– I’m going to stop being reactionary
– I’m going to stop negotiating with my own potential
– I’m going to run my business like a professional, on purpose
Because the truth is… most “breakthrough years” are just the public seeing the last 10% of a process you’ve been executing quietly for a long time.
People and a plan.
Slowly… then suddenly.
Onwards,
DDD