The Romance Of The Rose Bowl? Indiana Football Coach Curt Cignetti Isn’t Concerned With That

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – If you grew up in Big Ten country, within the traditional territory of the 10 core Midwestern schools in the conference, the Shangri-La of your college football dreams is the Rose Bowl.

The Big Ten champion played there annually from 1946 to 2001. The Big Ten champ has been in the Jan. 1 game since then in years when the Rose Bowl wasn’t part of the Bowl Championship Series or the College Football Playoff.

It’s a lifetime dream, if you follow one of the traditional Big Ten schools, to see your favorite team run out into the wide-open spaces of the vast Rose Bowl stadium on New Year’s Day. Programs that have made regular appearances – Michigan, Ohio State to name the most obvious examples – see it as their minimum annual goal. If they’re not playing in Pasadena? Something went wrong.

Other programs – Indiana and Purdue jump to mind – have played in the game so rarely that it’s a kind of unrequited dream. The Hoosiers only played in the Rose Bowl once; every other traditional Big Ten school has played in it multiple times. Indiana made its appearance after its magical 1967 season.

Purdue, Minnesota and Northwestern have been in the game twice. Illinois and Michigan State have made five appearances. It’s a rare treat for most of the traditional Big Ten membership and one to be celebrated when you do play in the game.

The lore of the Rose Bowl goes beyond that. The iconography is famous. The weather is seemingly almost always letter-perfect. The Rose Bowl organizers fight to have their kickoff at 5 p.m. ET so fans and TV viewers get to see the sunset over the nearby San Gabriel Mountains. The stadium itself sits along the picturesque Arroyo Seco, a ravine that leads toward Los Angeles proper.

It’s one of the most famous venues in sports, and Indiana will play there for just the second time in school history as it visits UCLA for a 7:30 p.m. ET kickoff Saturday.

Indiana coach Curt Cignetti has been to the Rose Bowl once. He was the receivers coach (and recruiting coordinator) on the Crimson Tide’s 2009 national championship team. Alabama defeated Texas 37-21 in the Rose Bowl to win the title.

It’s here where it’s instrumental to remember that Cignetti is always hyper-focused on the state of his team. When asked about the lore of the Rose Bowl stadium? The Indiana coach wasn’t really feeling it.

“Rose Bowl has a lot of tradition for people that follow football,” Cignetti said, before he let the other shoe drop.

“For me and the team, it’s more of a business trip, whether we’re playing in the Rose Bowl or in a parking lot. It’s all the same,” Cignetti added.

Romantic? Hardly. Not that Cignetti’s attitude is wrong; it’s absolutely right. Sentiment is not a commodity Cignetti has room for with the Hoosiers staring down their Big Ten opener.

“It’s going to be a little longer trip out there, bus to Indianapolis, fly out of there into L.A., about an hour to the hotel, little bit of a time change, but it’s no big deal,” Cignetti said matter-of-factly.

But what about the pull the Rose Bowl has on Big Ten heartstrings? The fond Hoosier memories of 1967? That famous sunset that may play out toward the end of Saturday’s 4:30 PT kickoff?

“The venue, it’s never really played a big part in it from a coaching standpoint, and we’re looking forward to playing,” Cignetti said.

Oh.

To be fair to Cignetti, the Rose Bowl has become just another conference venue to conquer. And while the stadium itself brings forth nostalgic memories for Big Ten fans for New Year’s Day pasts? This is a regular-season conference game. There won’t be any Rose Parade when Indiana arrives in Pasadena in mid-September.

It can be a problematic venue for the hosts. UCLA has called the Rose Bowl home since 1982. The very thing that makes the Rose Bowl unique – the vast 106,869 seating capacity – works against a good game-day atmosphere when the Bruins take over the stadium.

UCLA’s average attendance in 2023 was 47,950 with a high of 71,343 for a game against Colorado and a low of 35,437 against a then-No. 13 Washington State team.

UCLA’s on-field fortunes have been mediocre for many years – the Bruins last won a conference title in 1998, and they’ve only finished in the season-ending top 25 four times in the 21st Century – so they’ve had trouble maintaining support at the venue. There has been talk over the years about moving to a different facility or building a stadium that is more appropriate for UCLA’s needs.

Still, it’s the Rose Bowl. The field of dreams for Big Ten football fans. Indiana is playing on that field. It’s a big deal, right?

Cignetti won’t be drawn into all of that, as evidenced by follow-up questions from his press conference.

“It’s next game up. Every game is the most important game. You guys can write your stories and your angles on how important X game is relative to Y game, but they all count as one game,” Cignetti said. “It’s the first conference game, so we’re excited about that, and we want to get off to a good start.”

Cignetti isn’t going to let the Hoosiers get caught up in the allure of the Rose Bowl.

“That’s a big part of my job to make sure we eliminate the noise and the clutter and everybody understand why we’re there. The guys that make that trip will understand that,” Cignetti said.

Oh well. Fans can corner the market on romance. Cignetti knows the task at-hand is his priority.