Forty names, games, teams and minutiae making news in college football, where the shirtless dudes thing is one more reason this is better than the NFL game. First Quarter: How Is Your Second-Year Head Coach Doing? Second Quarter: Brian Kelly Is the Latest, But Not the Last, to Go.

Third Quarter: Curt Cignetti Stands Alone

As the victories have piled up, The Dash keeps trying to find someone in the history of the sport who has done what Curt Cignetti (22) is doing at Indiana. Not much is turning up. In terms of immediately launching a program above its historic level, Cignetti stands out as the best to do it at a power-conference program.

The Dash looked at the all-time winning percentages for all 68 programs at that level (teams currently in the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC, plus Notre Dame). Then The Dash identified the most successful man—who coached a minimum 20 games at that school—in terms of winning percentage. Then it was simple math to see who has outperformed program history by the widest margin.

Cignetti is by far the biggest outlier. Ever.

His Indiana record is 19–2, a winning percentage of .905. Indiana’s all-time winning percentage is .426, second-lowest among power programs, ahead of only Wake Forest. 

The upgrade: Cignetti is winning at a 47.9% higher clip than Indiana’s historic level. That’s absurd. He didn’t just give a faint pulse to a dead program; he got it up off the slab in the morgue and had it running wind sprints immediately.

Is winning 90% of his games sustainable over a longer period of time? No. Knute Rockne didn’t do that at Notre Dame, and neither did Frank Leahy. Nick Saban, greatest of all time, won 87.7% of his games at Alabama. So Cignetti really would be tearing down a wall if he could keep this up.

But he’s very solidly ahead of everyone else in terms of performance above history production at a school. The next-closest in those terms is Doc Kennedy at Kansas (23). Kennedy won 83.1% of his games with the Jayhawks from 1904 to ’10—not exactly the modern era. Kansas has an all-time .473 winning percentage, which means Kennedy won at a 35.8% higher rate. Not very close to what Cignetti is doing. 

Bear Bryant (24) performed immediate turnarounds at both Alabama and Kentucky. The Crimson Tide went from 4-14-2 in the two years before his arrival to 12-6-3 in his first two seasons, an upgrade of 34.5%; the Wildcats went from 5–14 to 15–6, an upgrade of 45.1%. 

By comparison, Cignetti took over an Indiana program that went 7–17 in 2022 and ’23 and has improved the winning percentage by 61.1%, heading into November. A significantly bigger jump than what Bryant did at Kentucky or Alabama.

The only other active coach who is the winning percentage leader at his current school is Jeff Brohm (25) at Louisville. The Cardinals’ all-time winning percentage is .527, and Brohm has won 73.5% of his games in three seasons leading his alma mater.

Other active coaches who are the all-time winningest at a previous stop:

Kalen DeBoer (27), now at Alabama, won 89.3% of his games in two seasons at Washington—a healthy 27.6% above program history. DeBoer currently is 16–5 with the Crimson Tide, which puts him behind Saban, Bryant, Frank Thomas, Wallace Wade, Gene Stallings and J.W.H. Pollard. There is a long history of winning big with the Tide.

DeBoer’s .762 winning percentage is just a tick above Alabama’s .744 as a whole, which is the best in college football history. The only others above .700 are Ohio State (.739), Notre Dame (.735), Michigan (.733), Oklahoma (.724) and Texas (.705).

Josh Heupel (28), now at Tennessee, won 77.8% of his games at Central Florida from 2018 to ’20. He ranks seventh in Volunteers history with a .717 percentage. John Barnhill, who coached Tennessee from 1941 to ’45, is No. 1 at .846.

Lincoln Riley (29), now at USC, is the all-time winner at Oklahoma at .846 from 2017 to ’21. That undoubtedly does not thrill a segment of the fan base that has never forgiven him for leaving. Riley is barely ahead of national championship winners Barry Switzer, Bud Wilkinson and Bob Stoops.

Other coaches who became the biggest winners in a school’s history this century (30): Urban Meyer at Utah, going 22–2 (.917) in 2003 and ’04 before leaving for Florida; Chip Kelly at Oregon, going 46–7 (.868) from 2009 to ’12 before leaving for the NFL; Brian Kelly at Cincinnati, going 34–6 (.850) from 2006 to ’09 before leaving for Notre Dame; and Tom Herman at Houston, going 22–4 (.846) in 2015 and ’16 before leaving for Texas.

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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Forde-Yard Dash: Curt Cignetti Is Doing What No Power-Conference Coach Ever Has.