Talent is a given in the NFL. What separates players isn’t always explosiveness or potential. It’s reliability under pressure–when things don’t go the way that they were diagramed during practice. As injuries reshaped depth charts and tested continuity this past season for the San Francisco 49ers, they moved forward with an unsettling calm. Their standard…
In college athletics, attention gravitates toward the visible: the head coach pacing the sideline, the star player under stadium lights, the results posted on scoreboards and social feeds. What rarely makes headlines is the work happening quietly in the background—the conversations without cameras, the mentorship without metrics, the leadership that doesn’t announce itself until years…
There was little reason to think that Indiana would turn into the new Alabama—or that Indiana would humiliate the old Alabama in the Rose Bowl, 38–3. Cignetti had been an assistant to Nick Saban at Alabama, but that was nearly two decades ago. He’d left Tuscaloosa for a low-paying job as head coach at Indiana…