Here’s the thing: we hired the best available coach at the time Saban retired, based on resume.
No one in their right mind would have been excited had we passed up a guy like CKD for Cignetti in January 2024. True, he coached at UA previously but not even as a coordinator. He’d been a position coach 13 years previously, which is practically a lifetime given how the game evolved during that time.
Directly comparing their resumes as of January 2024, the only real advantage you’d give Cignetti was that he’d been a head coach for 13 years as opposed to 9 for CKD. Even so, CKD’s win percentage was higher and he had more hardware. Anyone who says we should’ve hired Cignetti in January 2024 is engaging in revisionist history based heavily in recency bias.
What Cignetti has done at Indiana is impressive for sure - but even that needs to be examined beyond the 2025 Rose Bowl. He faced the 60th toughest schedule nationally at the end of the 2025 regular season per Sagarin, and the 103rd toughest schedule in 2024.
IMO, football games are played in more of a vacuum these days than they used to be. I think the Rose Bowl was a really bad day for our team that made us look far worse than we actually were, and made Indiana look far better than they actually are. The narrative that “we were whipped physically” and that “Bama is soft” is easy to derive from the outcome of that game but IMO isn’t completely indicative of the team’s performance this season.
Earlier in the season we held the nation’s #2 running back to 52 yards against Mizzou (Ahmad Hardy ran for 1,649 yards this season and averaged 127 yards per game). Mizzou as a team averaged 228 ypg rushing (8th nationally and 1st in the SEC) and we held them to 160 yards. Oklahoma ran for 129 yards combined in their two games against us, good for 65 yards per game. Soft teams don’t post those kinds of stat lines against quality SEC opponents. Indiana ran for 215 yards on us, but around 70 of that came in the 4th quarter when the defense was completely gassed because the offense couldn’t stay on the field.
There are some things that need to be cleaned up, offensive line chief of those things. We aren’t ever going to look like the 2011 Alabama offense under CKD because that’s not who he is philosophically, but with better line play we will have a respectable running game and a dynamic passing game. Staying on the field won’t be an issue for the offense if we can fix that. We’ve had two consecutive seasons in the top 20 nationally in scoring defense, holding opponents under 20 ppg average for both seasons. Fix the line play on offense and I think we will be a championship caliber team. Honestly, to get 11 wins, a CFP appearance, a CFP win, a trip to Atlanta, and wins over all major rivals (plus a regular season win at UGA) is one heck of a coaching job considering how atrocious the line play was at times this season.
Some of y’all are being way too reactionary based on one (possibly two) games. Gene Stallings got absolutely smashed by the likes of Louisville and Florida his first two seasons and won a national title in his third season. As for temperament, I saw CKD get pretty dang fiery at times this season but I also think that’s an overrated coaching attribute. The fieriest, most intense coach I’ve ever seen is Will Muschamp and we know how that turned out.
I don’t know if CKD works out long-term but he’s literally off to as good of an overall start in his first two seasons as any Bama coach in the modern era (20 wins - one game better than Saban, two games better than Stallings, three games better than Fran, four games better than Curry and miles ahead of the Mikes and Perkins).
If he regresses in year three then I think there’s a legitimate discussion about his fitness for the job. I also think Cignetti has had a bit of a lightning in a bottle situation at Indiana and I’ll personally be surprised if he sustains it, especially considering his age. Larry Coker, Gene Chizik and Gus Malzahn looked like world beaters early in their tenures at Miami and AU. Malzahn in particular got to the national title game after a 3-9 season the prior year with a cast of transfers and “lesser” players, and we know how that turned out.
Let’s hold off calling CKD a bust and crowning Cignetti the next Saban just yet. See what happens next season.
