BLOOMINGTON — Indiana football coach Curt Cignetti isn’t headed to Pasadena for a history lesson. Or sight-seeing.
The Hoosiers (2-0; 0-0 Big Ten) play UCLA on Saturday at the Rose Bowl, a famed venue that’s hosted national title games, Super Bowls and Olympic finals. The stadium opened its doors in 1922 and is recognized as a National Historic Landmark.
Indiana’s only previous game at the stadium was a 14-3 loss to USC in the 1968 Rose Bowl. The Hoosiers earned a Rose Bowl bid after winning a share of the Big Ten title, a feat the program hasn’t repeated in the decades that followed.
None of that is of much interest to Cignetti.
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“The Rose Bowl has a lot of tradition for people that follow football,” Cignetti said. “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.”
It’s the same point Cignetti made at Big Ten Media Days about the trip, albeit in slightly less colorful language.
“We’re just going to an old stadium to kick somebody’s ass,” Cignetti said, in July. “That’s not directed to UCLA, that’s the objective every week. Look, I know 1967 we were there and haven’t been there since, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We’re not going out on a cruise or a tour.”
The fact that the game is ushering in a new era for the Big Ten didn’t interest Cignetti much either.
UCLA is one of four new teams (USC, Oregon and Washington) that joined the conference in 2024 and the Bruins are the first one to play a league matchup in their first-ever matchup against Indiana. He referred to all the storylines surrounding the game as “noise” and “clutter.”
“It’s the next game up,” Cignetti said. “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. It’s the first conference game, so we’re excited about that, and we want to get off to a good start.”
Michael Niziolek is the Indiana beat reporter for The Bloomington Herald-Times. You can follow him on X @michaelniziolek and read all his coverage by clicking here.
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Publish date : 2024-09-09 10:28:00
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