The Indiana Hoosiers are the best team in college football. Ok maybe not, but the fact that I could type that sentence out and not absolutely lose my mind laughing is a testament to just how good Curt Cignetti’s Indiana Football is. I waited to write this on purpose. I thought about writing something after their record-setting outing against Western Illinois, and again after they pantsed UCLA at the Rose Bowl to start 3–0. What I ultimately decided was that I wanted to wait until the Hoosiers had played a few Big Ten games. The 2022 team started 3–0 before the Big Ten season started and ended the year at 4–8, so it wouldn’t be a wild thing for Indiana to have some issues with maintaining the level of play they had into the conference schedule.
For the uninitiated, Indiana football isn’t what you would typically describe as “good.” Most of the time Indiana football resembles a fourth grader trying to dunk on a regulation basketball hoop. It’s cute they’re trying, but ultimately there’s a pretty low cap on their ability to succeed in that endeavor. Historically this has not been much of an issue. IU’s a basketball school in a basketball state after all, who cares if the state’s flagship university routinely shits the bed in the country’s most beloved sport! There are football schools and basketball schools, and for a long time it was just fine that Indiana was just a basketball school.
In recent years, the landscape of college sports has changed dramatically. There are three key pillars of these changes, being the introduction of athletes being able to benefit off of their name image and likeness, the loosening of regulations around entering the transfer portal, and realignment. On their own, all three of these things would dramatically change the sport, but in conjunction together it has led to an absolutely seismic shift in how college sports works.
In college sports, conferences basically function as a union for negotiating television contracts. They can claim it’s bigger than that, and that individually conferences have their own individual personalities and are representative of a certain segment of the country. While this may have been true 30, or maybe even 20 years ago it is no longer the case. These TV deals are where the vast majority of the money comes in, so joining up with other schools you play frequently to drive up the price of airing those games is a generally good idea. The number one thing to keep in mind with these deals is that televised college football and college basketball generates the vast majority of revenue for these television stations, with football completely dominating basketball in recent years. For a school like Indiana this is a problem. The thing about being in a union to negotiate deals like this is it requires you to bring something to the table that would be bad to lose. When Michigan and Ohio State pull up their chairs to the negotiation table the television networks realize they’re running the risk of potentially not being able to televise “The Game.” When pre-Curt Cignetti Indiana pulls their chair up to these meetings, the TV network may run the risk of losing a basketball team that used to be awesome 30 years ago and sometimes makes the tournament now. You can see how a school like IU being at the table can hurt teams with an ability to generate TV revenue for football. The worst thing you can do to a business partner is mess up the money- if IU was going to continue being a member of the Big Ten for the foreseeable future they had to get good at football and fast- ideally before the next round of TV contract negotiations started back up.
Ok so we’ve established that Indiana was in a do or die situation this last offseason. If they didn’t get good at football like, right now, they were going to be looking over their shoulder at every negotiation going forward- not a fun place to be. Who do they get as the head coach? There weren’t a whole lot of great options. Indiana isn’t a school that can just go poach another Power Four school’s coach- they were either going to have to take an up and coming coordinator, or go for an older guy at a smaller school.
From 2019 to 2023 Curt Cignetti established himself as a transcendent program builder. James Madison University, a school that until 2022 was in the FCS doesn’t get a whole lot of national attention for football. That changed in 2023, when in just their second FBS season they went 11–1 and played in the Armed Forces bowl. Indiana boosters looked around, assessed the situation, and decided that this was the guy to take Indiana football to the level that the university needed.
It’s been alright so far. Through nine games Indiana hasn’t lost a single one. Not only that, but they have won every game by at least 14 points, including a 74 point (not a typo) victory over Western Illinois. Indiana is steamrolling everybody and they’re doing it with a bunch of guys that weren’t even hear last year. The transfer portal gave Indiana 10/11 of their offensive starters and half the defense. Curt Cignetti has taken a bunch of guys that weren’t at IU nine months ago and turned them into a national title contender.
So how does IU maintain this? It’s an open secret that IU football historically is not a destination job for head coaches. A lot of the conversation surrounding this year’s Indiana team is what Curt Cignetti does after this. Does he stay in Bloomington and be God, or does he go to a school like Ohio State and be a prisoner to their expectations. I don’t think that Indiana will make it out of this offseason without at least renegotiating with Cignetti. Ohio State fans have spent the entirety of the Ryan Day era competing for National Championships, but have also consistently lost to their most hated rival in Michigan while also watching them win a national title. Particularly in the last few years, the average Ohio State fan’s gameday has included lambasting recruits that should be better, and cursing Ryan Day’s ancestors for any sexual encounter that led to his birth.
Does Curt Cignetti want this? That’s what he’s getting at Ohio State, and it’s even more of what he’ll get if he goes south of the Mason Dixon line. I don’t know. What I do know is that the Indiana Hoosiers are undefeated at football, and I still can’t believe I’m typing that.
