Indiana went 11-2 last season and made the College Football Playoff in Curt Cignetti’s first year. The Hoosiers returned most of their roster in 2025. And yet the national perception heading into this season has been cautious at best, skeptical at worst.
On The Joel Klatt Show this week, Cignetti was asked why pundits have been slow to embrace Indiana again after last season.
“Last year, we were kind of like the media darling until the playoff rankings started to come out around Week 9 or 10, whenever that was,” Cignetti explained. “And let’s face it: I was kind of out there last year, too, publicly.”
Indiana’s 10-0 start made them the sport’s Cinderella story through October. But once the College Football Playoff committee started releasing its weekly rankings in early November, the skepticism only got stronger. The schedule wasn’t hard enough. The margins weren’t impressive enough. By the time Indiana lost 38-15 to Ohio State in the regular season and 27-17 to Notre Dame in the first round of the playoff, the narrative had already shifted from “incredible turnaround” to “maybe they weren’t that good to begin with.”
Cignetti’s public approach during his first year wasn’t accidental, either. He arrived in Bloomington and immediately sensed something was off about how the program viewed itself in relation to football. The mentality bothered him. So he made himself the face of change, saying things that didn’t come naturally to him because he thought Indiana needed someone willing to challenge the sport’s hierarchy.
“When I got the job here, Day 1, there were a lot of things that kind of rubbed me the wrong way,” Cignetti said. “You know, the vibe I was getting, just the general reaction to football. And I sort of had to be out there a little bit. I made some comments, let’s face it. It was a little bit out of character for me, but I thought that’s what this program needed, someone to kind of carry the flag, lead the charge, create the vision. I’m not afraid of the big boys.”
The “Google me” era of Cignetti worked until the only two losses of his tenure in Indiana piled up. Now in Year 2, he’s dialed back the public persona in favor of focusing on the actual work of building a program. But the residue from those playoff games has stuck around longer than he and Indiana probably expected.
“I feel like we sort of established ourselves last year, and this year, just focused in on coaching football and the process of coaching football,” he said. “So, I think a lot of people were maybe a little down on us going into the year because of the way we played against Ohio State and Notre Dame.”
And what makes the current skepticism more complicated, according to Cignetti, is that college football’s media ecosystem has fractured along conference and network lines. Coverage isn’t neutral anymore, at least it can’t be when TV deals and beat writers are explicitly tied to specific leagues and schools. The incentives push everyone toward tribalism, whether they admit it or not.
“College athletics, college football, has really changed a lot in the last 5, 10, 15 years. And there’s a division,” Cignetti continued. “There’s no doubt about it, in the media, and a lot of it’s tied into whatever TV network is covering which conference. And then you’re going to have sports writers that support those schools against the other schools. So, there is definitely a great divide.”
Indiana isn’t in the SEC or a legacy Big Ten program with decades of built-in credibility. The Hoosiers don’t benefit from the institutional momentum that carries certain schools through rough stretches. When they win, it’s a novelty. When they lose badly, it confirms what people suspected all along.
Cignetti established what Indiana could be in Year 1. Whether the program gets credit for sustaining that in Year 2 — or whether the skepticism becomes the default position — probably depends on factors beyond just winning and losing. The structure of college football media in 2025 doesn’t reward late-arriving programs the same way it protects established ones. And Cignetti seems to understand that reality, even if he doesn’t particularly like it.
