For some of you, Curt Cignetti, the head coach of Indiana football, is a new and unnerving experience for you. He stands there in his windbreaker smoking invisible cigarettes of smoldering disdain, seeking the thinnest slice of disrespect, silently hoping it comes from you. He might be under your bed right now.

The Mighty Cignetti! Our circles crossed when James Madison was made a member of the Sun Belt, and I was covering SBC Media Days in New Orleans. That year, naive Sun Belt coaches had the gall to predict a last place finish for The Dukes, who were recently elevated to the FBS. This did not sit well with Curt Cignetti at all.

“I don’t know why we’re picked last,” said Cignetti, every atom inside his body working to contain the destructive collapsing neutron star that serves as his soul. “Everywhere I go, I win.”

It was a precursor to “Google me,” Cignetti’s famous response to the prolonged questioning of Cignetti’s ability to transform noted-basketball school Indiana into a college football powerhouse. Some people were put-off by such a blunt and not-very-humble response, but those who personally witnessed “Google Me” just received an unadulterated blast of Classic Cignetti, a man whose confidence in his own abilities is rivaled only by the frontman of the alternative rock band Cake. (If you’ve ever attended a Cake concert, you know exactly what I’m talking about.)

The Enigmatic Cignetti! After Day One of Sun Belt Media Days, I spotted the JMU coach sitting alone at the hotel bar. After knocking down a beer, I approached him to make introductions. Listen, I’m not a journalist. I don’t have that kind of integrity. I’m just going to tell you how I remember our brief interaction. Maybe it didn’t really happen. (I think it did.) I told him my name, he told me his, and after an awkward moment of silence, Curt Cigentti said, “I have a daughter who lives here. She’s a surgeon.” That’s it! That was the entire conversation. Does Curt Cignetti have a daughter who’s a surgeon who lives in New Orleans? i have no idea. A real journalist might have followed up. But these are the only words Curt Cignetti has directed to me personally. I cherish them.

That season, Curt Cignetti and the James Madison Dukes finished 6-2 in conference and won the SBC East Division (though byzantine transfer rules prevented JMU from claiming the title). That team was led by Dukes legendary quarterback Todd Centeio. The next season, Centeio was gone, prompting Sun Belt coaches to once again overlook Curt Cignetti and JMU in the preseason. Doubts hedged largely on Centeio’s absence and unproven quarterbacks on the Dukes’ roster. Not surprisingly, Cignetti took a dim view of this prediction. A very dim view.

“I don’t know why anybody doubts my ability to develop a quarterback,” said Cignetti, frying reporter’s faces with invisible death rays emanating from his brain. “I just do it every year.“

That year, new JMU quarterback Jordan McCloud threw for 3,650 yards, totaled 35 touchdowns, and led James Madison to an 11-1 record, one of the finest seasons ever put together by a Sun Belt program.

Among the Sun Belt, Curt Cignetti was not a popular guy, except in Harrisonburg, where he was regarded as a mixture of Tom Skerrit and Vince Lombardi. He was notoriously short with the press (though he generally made himself available). He was unabashedly convinced of his own infallibility. He was an SBC boogeyman who emerged from the FCS closet to terrorize opposing teams with suffocating defense and ballistic offense. Curt Cignetti wasn’t spending his time writing Hallmark Channel fan fiction. He was burying his opponents alive in an unmarked grave somewhere off the highway.

There’s this great scene in the 1933 version of The Invisible Man when Claud Rains threatens a character: “I shall kill you tomorrow night. I shall kill you even if you hide in the deepest cave of the Earth. At ten o’clock tomorrow night, I shall kill you!” That’s Curt Cignetti! He’s Claud Rains in The Invisible Man and nobody can stop him.

When Curt Cignetti left the Sun Belt, I was bummed. The Sun Belt had all kinds of coaches – high energy protein shakers, coach speak philosophers, arms-crossed disciplinarians, and aw shucks good ol’ boys, but only one Curt Cignetti, and now he was a Hoosier of all things. You don’t have to Google the guy. He’s Michael Douglas in “Basic Instinct,” dropping world-weary one liners while wearing cashmere sweaters in nightclubs. If you hire a guy to cut your grass, and that guy happens to be Curt Cignetti, your lawn will look so immaculate you won’t mind at all that he handed you the bill with utter contempt in his eyes. Google Curt Cignetti? You may as well ask Jeeves. Nobody really knows the man.

God bless, Curt Cignetti. The two years the Sun Belt had him is a carbon copy of what Indiana is experiencing now – nothing but dry observations, radioactive self assuredness, winning and championships. Don’t try to understand him. You may as well grab an Infinity Stone and explode. He sweats Stetson cologne and drives a spaceship he built himself. You will never meet another football coach like Curt Cignetti. It’s okay to feel shaken by this truth.

PHOTO: Sun Belt Media