James Madison head coach Curt Cignetti said in the week ahead of the Dukes’ FCS semifinals matchup with Weber State that he’s never met Wildcats Jay Hill. But with a berth in the National Championship on the line, it won’t be the first time the two were on opposing sidelines in a high stakes game. 

Before throwing it back to the past, some necessary present-day context: Studying Hill’s team on film, Cignetti has praise for its defensive tenacity and attention to special teams. 

Hill cultivated a fair proportion of his head-coaching approach from his past experiences as an assistant coach -- in a 2018 interview with the Deseret News, he called Weber State “super similar” to Utah, where he spent 15 years as a player and then an assistant. 

Utah under coach Kyle Whittingham routinely leads the Pac-12 Conference in a variety of defensive and special teams statistical categories. Weber State is a similar standard bearer in the Big Sky Conference. 

Cignetti is no different from Hill in that his past colleagues helped shape his approach as a head coach. That includes his own father, Frank Cignetti Sr., and the most decorated head coach of the modern era, Nick Saban. 

The similarities in James Madison during its dominant 2019 and some of the Saban-coached Alabama teams are evident. Both build off stifling and aggressive defense that a balanced and physical offense complements. 

And a little more than a decade ago, the influences that helped shape how they run their programs today collided in one of the most important games of this era in college football. 

January 2, 2009. The Bowl Championship Series celebrated its 10th anniversary -- though celebrate may not be the correct word. 

The system existed for its 10th anniversary by this point, but no shortage of vocal fans and media (and even Saturday Night Live’s Will Forte in a hilarious song) voiced their displeasure over the limited scope of the system. 

Introduced to solve the championship dilemmas of years past -- in the 1990s, for example, the BCS might have pit the 1991 Miami Hurricanes and Washington Huskies head-to-head, or the 1997 Michigan Wolverines and Nebraska Cornhuskers. 

But for every USC-Texas classic to cap the 2005 season, the BCS produced a contentious title game like Oklahoma-LSU in the 2004 Sugar Bowl, or USC-Oklahoma in the 2005 Orange Bowl. 

In that 2004 season, which culminated with USC thoroughly undressing an overmatched Oklahoma team, Utah finished with a perfect record under head coach Urban Meyer. Jay Hill was an administrative assistant on that team, which was the first program from a non-BCS conference invited to a BCS bowl. 

Utah’s historic trip to the 2005 Fiesta Bowl lacked some of the luster befitting such a landmark moment. Instead of pairing the Utes up with fellow undefeated Auburn, they played a middling Pitt team that frankly was not as good as non-BCS conference teams that season like Conference USA’s Louisville or the Western Athletic Conference’s Boise State. 

But, by virtue of the Big East’s automatic bid, the Panthers went to the Fiesta Bowl. Utah thrashed them, but never received any serious consideration for a split national championship, which AP voters awarded to USC the season prior. 

Utah’s place in history as the first BCS buster was somewhat overshadowed two years later when Boise State stunned Oklahoma in a Fiesta Bowl that remains one of the greatest college football games ever played. 

The Utes got their shot at history, however. It came in January 2009. 

Alabama, in just its second season under Saban, ran the table in the regular season to reach the BCS Championship Game. The Crimson Tide lost in Atlanta to a Tim Tebow-led Florida Gators bunch, coincidentally coached by Urban Meyer. 

The wide receivers coach of that Alabama team was Curt Cignetti. 

Losing the SEC Championship game sent the Crimson Tide to New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl, matching them up with undefeated Utah. The 2008 season played out particularly oddly: Three Big 12 teams went 11-1 in the regular season, USC lost on a Thursday night after crushing Big Ten champion Ohio State, and the SEC had a pair of 12-1 teams in Alabama and Florida. 

Although it lost to Florida, Alabama was right on the cusp of that national championship mix, having led the SEC Championship Game much of the way. 

“"Our players are certainly disappointed,'' Saban said in a press conference ahead of the Sugar Bowl. "But this is an opportunity. If you're going to be a great team, when you lose, you want to come back and play your best the next time you play.''

The year before at the same bowl game, another SEC team, Georgia, destroyed non-BCS conference bowl-buster Hawaii. It became evident early into the 2009 Sugar Bowl, Utah wasn’t Hawaii. 

The Utes scored the first 21 points, all in the first quarter. 

Alabama rallied with 17 unanswered spanning the second and third quarters, but Utah’s defense did not yield another point for the final 25 minutes. 

Hill had elevated to special teams coordinator by this point in his coaching career. Alabama scored on a punt-return touchdown, but otherwise, Utah special teams won the day. It forced two Crimson Tide missed field goals, and kicker Louie Sakoda booted the game out of reach with a field goal in the final minutes. 

The Sugar Bowl proved transformative on a number of fronts. Last year ahead of its first-ever Pac-12 Conference Championship Game, Whittingham credited the high-profile victory in part for Utah garnering a bid into the power league. 

“That season [and] the ’04 season when we went undefeated,” he said. “It was a culmination of a lot of good things that happened in our program that got us that invite.”

But while in 2004 Utah was one of three teams to finish the campaign undefeated, and well out of the national championship conversation by virtue of playing a lesser bowl opponent, the 2008 season was another story. 

Utah emerged from the heap the sole unbeaten in college football, and boasting a two-touchdown win over an opponent that took BCS champion Florida to the brink. AP voters did not deem that sufficient for tabbing the Utes a split champion, however, which underscored the haves-vs-haves not attitude the BCS reinforced. 

In the subsequent months, lawmakers in the state of Utah threatened an antitrust lawsuit against the BCS to open more opportunities for the non-automatic qualifying conferences. Mountain West Conference commissioner Craig Thompson that same offseason suggested replacing BCS computer rankings with a human committee. 

Demand for a playoff at the FBS level was already at a fever pitch. The 2009 Sugar Bowl provided one significant push to make it a reality. 

Fortunately at the FCS level, championships end in no such controversy. When Cignetti and Hill are on opposite sidelines again, this time actually meeting one another, the winner will get a fair crack at the national title.