It remains seared into the recollections of Ohio State fans worldwide as one of the great beatdowns delivered in Buckeye football lore: the 1996 win over Pittsburgh that ended in a 72-0 final score in favor of OSU.
The game has been immortalized several times on Eleven Warriors in recent and distant years. Ramzy Nasrallah roughly six years ago catalogued the history of Panther slayings that led to Mark May becoming a symbol of institutionalized anti-Ohio State brain rot at ESPN.
This very series a little under a year ago championed the accomplishment of David Boston as the only player in the history of high-level football to score a touchdown with just seven teammates on the field. You will be shocked to learn a whole season of the sport later that Boston remains the only person to do so.
So why revisit such a one-way whooping once again? What new developments could possibly be gained from another look back?
One of the characters in this story recently became a national champion: Curt Cignetti.
The current Indiana Hoosiers head coach and Chipotle-powered reigning overlord of college football was once a Pittsburgh grad assistant that gradually made his way back to the Panthers in 1993. From his time there until moving on to NC State in 2000, Cignetti rotated through quarterback and tight end coaching duties as well as recruiting coordinator responsibilities.
That would suggest the man running the show for the most recent conference opponent to beat Ohio State was on staff for Pittsburgh that fateful day in 1996 when the Buckeyes unleashed a torrential downpour still reminisced about decades later.
Yet, when you google Cignetti per his own suggestion, good luck finding details about his time coaching with the Panthers in the 1990s. His Wikipedia career bio curiously fast forwards over that stop in his journey entirely, jumping directly from Temple in 1989 to NC State in 2000. Nearly all the photos of him online as a coach are from as early as his days with IUP that started in 2011, a decade and a half following Ohio State's shutout victory.
But it's a fact the man was at Pitt during that time, and it stands to reason that had Cig served as an assistant under Johnny Majors, he would have been somewhere on that sideline.
The only way to find out was to go back in time with no guarantees and wait for the truth to reveal itself.
Some of these commercials are bad enough to be in last weekend's Super Bowl. If you rewatch the entire broadcast for mid-90s nostalgia, you should particularly enjoy the ESPN2 ad that assaults your senses as it begs you to watch Georgia's And-1 hand-off mixtape before some guy named Donovan McNabb tries to keep up with Minnesota.
But the goal here is to find Cignetti amid this inevitable blowout, and so the hunt begins. Surely with all the panning to the camera of Majors and the Panthers' sideline during the worst loss of the College Football Hall of Famer's career, Cignetti is bound to turn up somewhere, right?
The touchdowns arrived as fast and furious as the final tally implies. Just about every other time you skip ahead in that video looking for a moment of Cig, the Buckeyes have somehow scored again. Before the end of the first quarter, Ohio State had already opted to rotate out starting quarterback Stanley Jackson in favor of then-backup Joe Germaine after the team's first three visits to the end zone of the day.
Pitt's punter had a known injury going into the game and botched an early fourth down to set up one of several scoring drives with fortuitous position for the Buckeyes that afternoon. The Panthers would also concede multiple fumbles on kickoff returns.
John Cooper's OSU team had over 50 points before halftime. The game had entered garbage time territory within the first 10 minutes. A young but already evidently brilliant Mike Tirico notified the ESPN audience and crew ahead of the break, "if Ohio State scores during halftime, we'll show that to you as well."
Still, no Cignetti. The 90s broadcast camera quality on a VHS rip doesn't help facial recognition, but most of these assistant coaches are all similarly dressed with or without glasses, hats, or other obscuring accessories even to this day. It's no wonder Connor Stalions exploited dressing up as one of these people to infiltrate the Central Michigan sideline, because many in the crowd really do look like the NPCs that EA Sports renders them as.
But then, as the two teams have seemed to mutually agree towards running out the clock, suddenly a possible sighting. With roughly nine minutes left in the fourth quarter, Majors begins having a conversation with one of his offensive staff members. The man is tall, wearing a headset, and ultimately relays a sequence of signals to the field before the next play.
Moments later, Ohio State defensive back Gary Berry intercepted the next pass from the Pittsburgh offense. During the celebration, ESPN cameras panned back to Majors as he gestured towards the field during a discussion with his assistant as if to say, "look at the mess we're in because of stuff like what just happened."
Again, the 90s camera tech makes it almost impossible to confirm this is Cignetti. But if this is not Cignetti, then it's at least somebody that comes from the same coaching tree of guys that are passionate about standing with their hands on their hips. Either way, it's the closest thing available online to a visual representation of Cignetti's time at Pitt than anything not AI-generated.
A few minutes after this almost otherwise entirely forgotten moment in a football game that ended by a margin of over 10 scores, David Boston made short-handed history on the final touchdown of the game and Ohio State eventually won 72-0. The embedded video of the broadcast includes a bit over a half hour of extra TV from the programming schedule if you want to spend a little more time in 90s Ohio.
Time works in mysterious ways, and Cignetti himself probably never could have guessed that nearly 30 years after this gridiron nightmare that he would dethrone the same opponent as the sport's top dog. It makes one wonder if Cignetti has this game somewhere in the back of his mind not only when approaching subsequent meetings with the Buckeyes, but also while striving towards similar margins of victory against opponents of any level from Indiana State and Illinois. As much as Ohio State fans often reflect on this game with delight, it's possible it could come to represent the beginning of Cignetti's meticulously crafted revenge arc against the Buckeyes if Indiana proves more than just a flash in the pan.
Then again, maybe Cig is just every bit of the self-described college football guy he claims to be. After all, a guy that played football at West Virginia but wanted to coach so badly he did it for Pittsburgh seems like the type that just wants to watch film while he eats his burrito bowl rather than concern himself with payback for a nonconference blowout from three decades ago.
