By Dana O’Neil, CNN
(CNN) — Nick Saban wanted to change his job description. After three years coaching linebackers, he was eager to take over the secondary, where he’d played in college. He was not, however, so sure he wanted to change jobs.
It was 1978, and he’d spent the past season at Syracuse University. While the Orange’s 6-5 record didn’t necessarily reflect it, Saban was fairly certain the staff was onto something and he thought he ought to stick around.
So when Frank Cignetti, Sr., called to offer him a job coaching the defensive backs at West Virginia – a team Syracuse had beaten 28-9 in the last game of the season – Saban was tempted but not entirely sold. He didn’t know Cignetti personally and figured someone on his staff must have recommended him. Probably because of his West Virginia roots.
So Saban mulled the decision only to find it wasn’t his to make. Cignetti already had closed the deal.
Terry Constable and Nick Saban met as seventh graders in Fairmont, West Virginia. She’d gone with Nick to Kent State as an undergrad, the two marrying during the holiday break in 1971. She thought her husband was going into the car business like his father – the original plan was to go to General Motors school after graduation.
Instead, while Terry finished her coursework, Nick took a job as a graduate assistant on the football team. Two years later, the would-be holdover gig turned into a full career pivot, and Nick chased his coaching dream to Syracuse, the first step in what would invariably be a far more nomadic career than the car business for the Sabans.
And now here was Cignetti offering Terry an unbelievable gift – the chance to go home.
“Frank taught me to figure out who was the key in the recruiting process. Who’s going to have the most influence? He was a master at that,’’ Saban told CNN Sports. “And in my case, it was Miss Terry.”’
Nearly 50 years later, Curt Cignetti sat at a dais inside the College Football Hall of Fame, which counts both Frank Cignetti and Saban as members. He unspooled his own traveling football career, which covered six states and 10 schools, calling special attention to his three-year full-circle stop in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Curt says it was there, where the son of the man who hired Nick Saban in 1978 worked for Saban, that the seeds for Indiana’s improbable rise were sown.
Who knows? Maybe Saban gets to know Curt Cignetti through some other coaching channels. But when he did actually hire him in 2007, it was at least in part because Miss Terry wanted to move home and two men – one who taught Curt to work hard and the other who showed him how to do the hard work – met in West Virginia.
Learning from the Big Guy
In the hometown newspaper obituary that celebrates the life of Frank Cignetti, Sr., his football coaching career is told in only the broadest of strokes. How he was a highly successful and respected coach whose football family “grew by generations and to this day stands as a testament to his life’s work.’’
There is an acknowledgment that Frank was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, but no mention of the 180 wins that earned his place in the Hall or the field that bears his name at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP).
Instead, the obituary celebrates the life of a high school star athlete nicknamed “Hoopo” who grew into his adult moniker, “Big Guy.” It tells of a man of great integrity who cherished his family and his faith and felt enormous gratitude to the doctors and nurses who guided him through a near-death run-in with cancer so that he could inspire others and help.
Tho