Indiana and Oregon square off to find out who will play Miami in the College Football Playoff national title game
What is happening at Indiana is not normal, not ever, but certainly not in the revenue-rich era of college football.
To the spenders go the spoils, and while IU as an athletic department wasn’t low rent, it was not keeping up with its peers. According to the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database, IU regularly trailed its Big Ten brethren in annual football spending, $12 million shy of the median in 2019.
With the help of deep-pocketed donors, the university has slowly opened its wallet. Two years ago, it finally crafted a football-only weight room and added new suites and this year put down new turf in the stadium.
But if football success was predicated on spending money alone, the Texas Longhorns would never lose a game. For the better part of its existence, Indiana football largely followed the playbook when it came to head coaching hires, either recycling former head coaches who’d been fired (Gerry DiNardo, Sam Wyche) or targeting assistants from other big-name programs (Tom Allen, Kevin Wilson).
In December 2023, after dismissing Tom Allen, Dolson opted to go in another direction, bringing in a wildly successful head coach who made up for what he lacked in name recognition with a history of winning.
Adding in his time at Indiana, Curt Cignetti is 137-37 as a head coach, a pattern of sustained success that ought to merit attention. Except his resume included stops at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, a Division II school; Elon, an FCS school; and James Madison (JMU), which only jumped to the FBS level in 2022.
Fair or not, Indiana was, frankly, the only sort of job the 62-year-old Cignetti was going to get.
In truth when, at a news conference, he provided his now legendary answer to a question about selling his vision to recruits – “It’s pretty simple. I win. Google me.’’ – he was being equal parts badass and honest. People did, in fact, have to Google him.
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