Ben Harakel has worked for Curt Cignetti since 2019 and has learned to treat every game the same.
Monday, Jan. 19 was different, though. Much different. This was the College Football Playoff championship game
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Twelve years after graduating from Conrad Weiser High School, Harakel was sitting in the coaches box as Indiana’s senior defensive analyst at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Fla., when he felt the enormity of the moment.
“To say it was stressful is a little bit of an understatement,” he said. “When you’re going into it, you want to make sure you do absolutely everything you can to finish the season the right way. You gotta make sure you see everything you’re supposed to see and make all the calls you’re supposed to make.”
When Jamari Sharpe intercepted Carson Beck’s pass to seal Indiana’s 27-21 victory over Miami (Fla.) and the national title, Harakel and many others in crimson and cream were able to exhale.
“It hits you, ‘Oh, we’re probably going to win the national championship,’ ” he said. “It was an incredible blessing. You’re just so happy for the kids in the locker room and the guys who put 11½ months of effort into it. You’re so proud of that group of guys.
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“On top of that, you’re so happy for all the people (in Indiana) who never thought they’d ever get to see it.”
Indiana began the season with the most losses in college football history and went 16-0 to complete perhaps the most remarkable season in team sports in recent years.
Ben Harakel’s coaching journey also has been quite unlikely.
He played football and baseball at Conrad Weiser, but he never got to be the starting quarterback, which he had longed to be. He was behind all-state pick Aidan Brosious.
“He’s smart, a student of the game,” Scouts coach Alan Moyer said. “He knew our offense inside and out. He knew our playbook probably better than half of our staff. He was a coach on the field.”
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Harakel learned a lot of football from his father, Andy, and his uncle, Tony, both former Weiser players and longtime assistant coaches. He recalled often watching game films with his father.
“That’s where I got my love for coaching,” he said. “I can still remember being a little kid and we’d get high school tapes of Gov. Mifflin vs. Boone and we’d be watching it. You see that stuff as a kid and it becomes part of your DNA.”
His father said Ben was 5 or 6 years old when he began asking questions about the games on his computer screen.
“He’d say, ‘What are you doing? Why are you watching that?’ ” Andy Harakel said. “I’d show him different things. As he got older and got into high school, then he started to understand what I was doing. Of course, now he knows more than I do. I feel like a rookie.”
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Ben was the salutatorian of Weiser’s Class of 2014 and enrolled at Penn State to study aerospace engineering. He knew his playing career was over. He didn’t know that he had a future in sports.
A few months after starting class at Penn State and having a lot of free time without a sport to play, he ran into an acquaintance who worked for the football team and asked if there were any positions open for a student. There was one in the video department.
“I got my foot in the door,” Harakel said. “My boss (video coordinator Jevin Stone) said, ‘Hey, man, you’re pretty good. You know the game. Is this what you want to do?’
“I told him I wanted to coach. I always knew I wanted to be something in coaching, whether it was a high school coach like my dad. I didn’t think there was a pathway to college coaching.”
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On Stone’s recommendation, Ryan Smith and Andrew Jackson, who were Penn State graduate assistants at the time, tested Harakel to see if he qualified to be a student assistant. They asked him to draw his high school offense and defense on a dry board. He impressed them and Brent Pry, then the linebackers coach.
“They gave me tasks every week,” Harakel said. “I kept accumulating responsibility as I went through my four years.”
Former Penn State coach James Franklin would often ask Harakel to remind him what degree he was pursuing.
“It’s funny,” he said. “He’d ask, ‘What’s your major?’ I’d tell him and he’d say, ‘Why the (expletive) are you here?’ I’d say, ‘I just love football, Coach.’ ”
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Harakel spent five seasons (2014-18) at Penn State as undergraduate assistant and landed a graduate assistant job at James Madison with the help of Pry. He chose to be a football coach and surprised his parents.
He made a small salary and lived with Jackson, who had been hired as the Dukes defensive tackles coach.
“He had an aerospace engineering degree and he became a GA at JMU for $11,000 a year,” Andy Harakel said. “I asked him, ‘How in the hell are you going to live?’ Credit to Coach Pry. He called up Jacks and said, ‘We took care of you. You take care of him.’
“Ben got a job at the golf course raking bunkers (to supplement his paltry income). That’s what he wanted to do.”
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That’s when Harakel met Cignetti, who had just been hired as James Madison’s head coach. He’s worked for him ever since, helping James Madison and Indiana go 79-12 in seven seasons.
He quickly learned why Cignetti has been so successful.
“It’s the attention to detail and being process-oriented,” Harakel said. “We’re going to do everything the right way. It’s amazing to see his complete and utter belief in the team that we’re putting together. He’ll come in and say, ‘All right, boys. All we have to do is win them all.’
“I want to make sure I’m not overlooking any detail. It’s the kind of mentality we have day in and day out. It’s not about the outcome. It’s not about winning the game. It’s about doing every single thing right because that’s the right thing to do.”
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His parents have made many trips to Indiana the last two years. They were at Hard Rock Stadium for the title game and were able to celebrate with Ben, who they once never expected to be a college football coach.
“I told him a long time ago to find something you love to do and make that your job,” his mother, Janell, said. “That’s what he’s done. He has seen us work in challenging circumstances. You can obviously tell that from his college degree. He disregarded that and is doing what he wants to do and loves.”
“He tells me, ‘It’s not a job, Dad,’ ” Andy Harakel said.
The day after Indiana won the title, Ben was in one of the team buses on the hour-long ride from the Indianapolis airport to the IU campus in Bloomington.
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“We’re driving down the highway and there are people on all the overpasses who see the buses coming and they’re waving flags,” Harakel said. “One had a couple fire engines out with ladders. To get one for the Hoosier community was really special.”
He and the rest of the Indiana staff went back to work the next day with smiles on their faces.
“I was very good at aerospace engineering, but I didn’t love it,” he said. “I wake up every morning and I’m excited to go do this. It’s not to say that there are days like, ‘Man, this isn’t the greatest day of my life.’ I genuinely love going to work every day and say that I get to do something that makes me excited.”
