What Indiana University's Undefeated Season Taught Me About Design
Coach Curt Cignetti's "radical belief" that you can't build a winning culture in a losing environment
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As I’ve shared with you before, every fall my husband and I travel to watch a college football game, a tradition now 27 years strong! Over the years, this has taken us to corners of America we’d never visit otherwise: Oxford, Mississippi. Lincoln, Nebraska. Ann Arbor, Michigan.
It’s not football I enjoy - it’s college football. There is something special about the history, pageantry, tradition, marching bands, and the infectious energy of college students.
What you may not know is that my husband is a proud graduate of Indiana University, and I became a Hoosier fan by default (marriage will do this).
For most of our marriage, rooting for Indiana football meant loyalty through heartbreak. IU held the pitiful distinction of being the losingest program in Division I college football. Year after year, we showed up anyway.
Then….something magical happened. ✨
Two years ago, Indiana hired a new head coach, Curt Cignetti, and what he’s accomplished in two years is nothing short of miraculous.
This season? Undefeated.
A Big Ten championship over Ohio State. (If you know, you know.)
A Rose Bowl beatdown of Alabama.
A Heisman quarterback in Fernando Mendoza.
A semifinal victory over Oregon at the Peach Bowl.
And now a chance at the National Championship against Miami.
But here’s what I want to share with you... not as a fan, but as a designer.
In interviews, Cignetti speaks candidly about his contract and the conditions he noticed upon his arrival: faded banners on the field; neglected locker rooms and meeting spaces; coaches’ offices looked frozen in the 1980s. His point was simple: You can’t build a winning culture in an environment that signals otherwise.
What makes this even more striking? Cignetti wasn’t an elite, high-profile coach when Indiana hired him. He’d spent years at smaller programs where he had to personally dust conference room tables before meetings and take out the trash. He understood, on a visceral level, that our environment shapes belief, effort, and results.
He was so clear about this that he told the university president and athletic director his success would depend not only on immediate upgrades, but on a long-term commitment to capital improvements every single year. This wasn’t about a one-time renovation. It was about consistently signaling that excellence was the expectation.
They trusted him and invested over $60 million to renovate and modernize the facilities in just the past two years.
The athletic director later joked, “If we’d known that was all it took to win, we would’ve done it years ago.”
As we step into 2026, I want to remind you that our environments shape how we work, rest, think, and dream.
The spaces around us quietly reinforce what’s possible.
Have a well-designed day,
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