You Can’t Microwave Culture
Why Curt Cignetti’s Indiana Model Is Working,
While Bill Belichick’s UNC Model Is Not (Yet)
By Mike Waddell
North Carolina Sports Network
(last updated Oct. 26, 2025)
It boggles the mind how many people around college football still believe in the myth of the quick flip — the idea that a brand-new coach, dropped cold into a struggling program, can instantly create a winning culture through charisma, slogans and a few portal pickups.
Reality check: college football doesn’t work that way.
The Myth of the “Quick Flip”
You can’t build chemistry overnight. You can’t install trust through a team meeting or a weekend trip to the Outer Banks. And you certainly can’t microwave culture — that’s like tossing a $750 Japanese Wagyu steak into a microwave and expecting a Michelin-star meal.
Or, to put it in North Carolina terms, it’s like shoving a whole hog into a giant air fryer and expecting championship barbecue to come out the other side — instead of a hog that’s been properly dressed, cooked low and slow over coals, and served to perfection at Parker’s Barbecue. One is a #NCPork five-snout 🐽🐽🐽🐽🐽 experience. The other? Well, that ends up in the compost pile.
Cignetti’s Culture Transfusion
Real transformation in college football takes roots. And no one has modeled that better this year than Indiana’s Curt Cignetti, the current coaching genius of the hour.
When Cignetti left James Madison for Bloomington, he didn’t just pack a whistle and a whiteboard. He brought an entire operational ecosystem with him:
- six on-field assistant coaches
- one key support-staff leader (strength & conditioning director Derek Owings)
- 13 players from JMU’s roster
That’s 20 people who already speak the same football dialect of Cignetti — a transfusion of trust, identity and system fluency, cured over decades with staff, and most importantly with the on-field players he brought from JMU who were — to a man — winners and fluent in all things Cignetti.
These players weren’t random transfers looking for playing time. They were hand-picked process carriers, proven winners coming from one of the most disciplined Group of Five programs in America. They already know the system, the expectations and the daily standard. They don’t have to learn the culture — they are the culture.
That’s what a real “quick flip” looks like — not a miracle, but a method.
The Cold Start in Chapel Hill
Now compare that to what’s happening in Chapel Hill under Bill Belichick.
Belichick landed at the Kenan Football Center with no existing infrastructure tied to him or his ways. He did not have the benefit of an active college staff or roster pipeline. Belichick, in particular, came straight off the “retired legend” shelf, diving head-first into the modern college landscape — a world dominated by NIL, the transfer portal and social-media optics — without a collegiate staff ready to implement his process.
That’s not a setup for success. It’s a cold start, and in 2025 college football, cold starts can be career-killers.
Indiana, on the other hand, imported an instant culture. North Carolina tried to invent one out of thin air. (And no, the Mack Brown culture was not all that, which is why there was a change.) What Mack 2.0 was, in big volumes, was familiar, like Frasier’s dad’s comfy chair.
Belichick’s Board of Trustees-led transition into college coaching was not set up for success. He came in cold, while Cignetti brought in 13 on-field dudes from an active roster steeped in his system — and that’s a huge difference. Each of those players already had the trust of the coaching staff. Each was hand-picked to be a culture warrior, immediately credible inside the locker room because of the success they came from and the bond they already had with their coaches.
That’s the DNA of a winning transition — and the absence of it is why UNC often looked fragile and directionless in the first half of Year One of the Belichick era.
How the Belichick Hire Actually Happened
For pure context into how the North Carolina transition unfolded, you first have to understand that UNC athletic director Bubba Cunningham did not want to hire Belichick as the Tar Heels’ head coach. Cunningham’s focus was on Tulane head coach Jon Sumrall and former Notre Dame and Alabama offensive coordinator Tommy Rees; those were his primary targets.
In reality, there were two separate searches happening in Chapel Hill. One was the internal process run by Cunningham and his lieutenants — a plan that had been in motion since early October, following Carolina’s 70-50 loss to James Madison and Brown’s emotional post-game breakdown.
Then came the parallel — and ultimately decisive — search, led by members of the UNC Board of Trustees. They effectively created a shadow government inside the process, pushing hard for the former Patriots and Browns head coach to take over. Belichick was introduced into the UNC lexicon by those trustees, who leveraged their influence to make him the centerpiece of their vision for a football revival.
On paper, the move carried prestige. In practice, it created chaos. Belichick arrived to find no existing college staff, no recruiting infrastructure and no pipeline for high school, portal or junior college talent evaluation. There was no continuity, no scaffolding — just a blank whiteboard and a ticking clock.
This was never set up to be successful in 2025. To truly grasp the magnitude of the transition, you’d have to break down every layer of the operation — hundreds of personnel decisions, new positions to fill that didn’t exist during the Brown regime, and all of it unfolding inside a state-run educational bureaucracy.
That’s an HR nightmare — like trying to run a marathon with fire ants and molasses poured over your feet. It’s sticky and extremely painful, and recovery is slow.
If you need proof, just look at how Carolina Athletics has struggled to manage even basic administrative issues — for example, the eligibility saga involving international men’s basketball player Luka Bogavac. Or look back to the Tez Walker administrative fumble from a few years ago. That’s one athlete. Now imagine trying to field 105 football players under those same procedural constraints and expecting immediate results.
It doesn’t make sense, and it never did.
The Recruiting Reset
One of the things that caught heat during the Brown-to-Belichick transition was the decision to let go of nearly the entire Brown-era recruiting staff. In certain circles, that move was labeled “reckless” or “shortsighted.”
But let’s be honest about where that criticism came from. The loudest voices of discontent were the very people who lost those jobs — the same ones who had long served as the primary information pipeline to fan-driven recruiting sites and message boards. That’s where most of that noise originated. Self created drama… smh.
With all due respect — and I mean that sincerely — to Brown, a man I enjoyed working with during my early years at North Carolina from 1991 to 1994, the program’s recruiting operation in recent seasons was not humming along at record pace. The data spoke for itself.
So, if there was ever a time to make a complete and total changeover, this was it. Belichick’s mindset, methods and organizational structure were always going to differ dramatically from the Brown era. That’s not a knock on Mack — it’s simply a reality of leadership transitions.
Full reset. Plug pulled and the hard drive was rebuilt. It should have come with a warning sticker advising an 18-month gestation.
It was not.
No head coach, in any sport, is excited about being forced to keep anyone from the previous staff. At the Power Four level, you build forward by bringing in your own people — individuals who already know your system, trust your process and can execute your standards. It’s the same in the NFL, in FBS football and increasingly even in lower divisions. Heck, most high schools don’t retain assistant coaches from one staff to the next anymore.
And in this modern NIL era, recruiting is more complicated and more vital than ever. The war room decisions that define a roster require total trust and total alignment. Belichick was never going to rely on holdovers from a previous era to run that mission-critical process.
It’s also understandable why much of the media covering UNC football doesn’t fully grasp the depth of what’s happening. Few of the people writing or broadcasting about Tar Heel football have ever played the game, even at the high school level. When you don’t have that kind of first-hand experience, you tend to react more like a fan — or base your opinions on the endless stream of “content” and speculation that’s out there, rather than on lived knowledge of how programs actually operate.
Still, many in the media — particularly the fan-driven recruiting outlets — have been itching to run Belichick and Mike Lombardi out of Chapel Hill since the team walked off the field on Labor Day. Preseason narratives built around “the easiest schedule in the ACC” and “the arrival of a six-time Super Bowl champion” created unrealistic expectations. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Belichick isn’t taking snaps. He’s building a foundation. And as anyone who’s been part of one of these transformations knows, the deeper you go into the season, the more a locker room starts to tighten and take shape. Players begin to understand exactly what’s being asked of them — how, why and with what standard.
That’s where the improvement comes from.
The next stretch of games will test that progress: at Syracuse, followed by Stanford, then the Big Four finish against Wake Forest, Duke and NC State.
Wake, under Jake Dickert, has taken off. Duke, led by Manny Diaz, has been one of the most balanced teams in the ACC, powered by quarterback Darian Mensah — who, ironically, might have been wearing Carolina blue had Cunningham been able to hire Sumrall, potentially bringing with him a dozen or more players from Tulane. And then there’s NC State at Carter-Finley, which could very well be Dave Doeren’s last game as the Wolfpack’s head coach.
Carolina could win every game the rest of the way — or lose every game. But if the recent results against Cal and Virginia have shown anything, it’s this: The Tar Heels are improving. They’re bonding. And they’re now losing games because of correctable mistakes, not because of a lack of belief or culture.
It’s just going to take time.
Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day — and Neither Is Culture
Things become clichés for a reason, and the old saying that “Rome wasn’t built in a day” couldn’t be more applicable in modern college football.
It does not happen overnight. You cannot microwave culture. Culture takes time to put in place. You must have players who possess immediate, first-hand knowledge of the system they’ll be playing in, and they must already have the trust of both the coaching staff and their teammates.
You can start building player-to-player trust over a spring and a summer, but what you cannot replace is the actual on-field, battlefield experience that comes only from competing together under fire. That’s the foundation of every great program — shared experience forged through adversity.
A great modern example of that kind of transition is Mike Elko. Look at what he built at Duke, and how quickly he’s now re-establishing culture at Texas A&M.
Elko followed a similar menu for success as Cignetti — structure, clarity, discipline and trusted people. His one misstep early at A&M was not being able to retain his Duke strength coach, a vital cultural pillar. But because Texas A&M has more money than most countries to invest in athletics, Elko was able to replace that position with another elite hire.
That’s part of his genius — he’s proven he can build cultures in very short order without cutting corners, because he understands what culture actually is.
In that way, Cignetti and Elko might be two of the best culture warriors in modern college football history — different personalities, same blueprint for success.
The Realities Fans Don’t See
Most fans don’t grasp this distinction — and that’s not their fault. Ninety-five percent of the conversation around new hires and recruiting is driven by emotion or hype.
The same message-board “insiders” who claim to have secret sources are often just amplifying narratives fed to them by staffers trying to shape perception. That’s the dirty secret of the modern recruiting-industrial complex: it’s all content marketing disguised as information.
Meanwhile, the actual work of transformation — the conditioning programs, culture installs, leadership development and playbook integration — gets no headlines, because it’s not clickbait.
But anyone who’s ever been inside a major college football program knows: That’s where the winning begins.
Over the course of my career in college athletics, I’ve been part of football coaching changes at West Point, Akron and Cincinnati (the transition from Mark Dantonio to Brian Kelly, and later from Kelly to Butch Jones), as well as Arkansas and Illinois.
I think it’s safe to say I know what I’m talking about when it comes to college football transitions — I’ve lived them. And in those specific instances, I wasn’t standing on the sidelines watching. I was directly involved in every facet of the process: firing the outgoing head coach, running the national search, managing athlete communication, handling donor relations, coordinating with HR and university administration, relocating families and negotiating new asset acquisitions tied to incoming contracts.
And those are just the visible parts of the iceberg. There are hundreds of smaller decisions — often 500 or more — that must be executed in the right sequence, at the right time, by the right people. Miss the timing on any of them, and you’re planting landmines that can explode months or even years down the road.
The chrysalis of a coaching transition is incredibly delicate and complex, especially within the framework of public education. Running a transition inside a state system — governed by procurement laws, HR policies and public oversight — is an entirely different challenge than executing one in the private sector. It’s a different map altogether, and navigating it successfully takes precision, patience and institutional alignment few programs ever achieve.
A Lesson From Cincinnati
When I was part of the Cincinnati transition from Dantonio to Kelly, that was a masterclass in how to do it right. Dantonio built the foundation; Kelly elevated it with energy, vision and the right people in the right roles from Day One.
There was no panic, no guesswork, no hype machine — just clarity and continuity.
That’s the same formula Cignetti has replicated at Indiana. And it’s why the Hoosiers, for the first time in decades, look like a program with purpose.
Final Thought
Culture isn’t a speech. It’s not a logo. It’s not even a coach.
It’s the daily standard — the unspoken agreement between staff and players that defines who they are and what they’re building together.
And that’s why Cignetti’s Indiana rebuild isn’t just another storyline. It’s a blueprint for every program that wants to stop pretending and start winning.
Because no matter how fancy the press conference or how famous the name on the door, one truth never changes:
You can’t microwave culture.
Just like great barbecue, it takes time, patience and the right fire — the kind that burns steady, not flashy. The kind that turns a program from raw to ready, low and slow, until it’s championship-tender.
