Hopefully, fans of struggling NFL teams aren’t banking on Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti making the jump to the NFL coaching ranks. While it would make a ton of sense to expect Cignetti to get NFL offers after his recent meteoric success in the NCAA, the Hoosiers are making it harder each year to buy the man out of his current commitment. 
It took a while for Cignetti to gain recognition for his accomplishments, but his notorious confidence is well-warranted, as a simple Google search confirms that he does, in fact, win. After 28 years filling assistant coaching roles at Davidson, Rice, Temple, Pittsburgh, NC State, and Alabama, Cignetti got his first head coaching opportunity in 2011 at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Aside from a single 6-5 campaign, Cignetti never lost more than three games with the Crimson Hawks, going 53-17 in six years with the team. He then moved on to Elon, where he went 14-9 in two seasons before getting hired at James Madison.
Cignetti immediately made himself known with the Dukes, going 14-2 in his first year at the school en route to an FCS championship game appearance. Over three years in the FCS, Cignetti’s team went 33-5, and they kept to their winning ways when they made the FBS jump to the Sun Belt Conference, finishing 8-3 in 2022 and 11-1 in 2023. It was at this point that Cignetti was hired at Indiana, which at that point in time was the losingest program in NCAA history (most all-time losses).
In Year 1 with the Hoosiers, Cignetti and Co. went 11-2, making the first-ever 12-team College Football Playoff but getting eliminated in their first game. It was the school’s first double-digit win season in its 127-year history (granted that in 61 of those seasons they did not play double-digit games). Indiana rewarded him with an eight-year, $93MM extension a month into Year 2 with the team. It hasn’t stopped there, though. Year 2 saw Cignetti’s Hoosiers become the NCAA’s first-ever team to go 16-0 en route to a national championship victory.
Apparently, Indiana didn’t believe the $11.63MM per year that they were paying him over the next several years was adequate compensation, because, according to ESPN’s Pete Thamel, Cignetti and the team have agreed to a new deal that will increase the annual average value of his salary to $13.2MM. He is under contract with the Hoosiers through the 2033 season.
Given Cignetti’s tremendous success, an eventual jump to the NFL felt like a no brainer. Instead, the school and coach have worked hard to solidify his future at Indiana for years to come. Perhaps some downtrodden NFL franchise will at some point inquire what it would take to lure him away from Indiana, but at the moment the Hoosiers are diligently building a wall around their leader and filling that four-walled room chock-full of money.
Good for him. Well deserved!
Become a living legend at Indiana, and whatever SEC school he eventually gets a truckload of money from…….or get mistreated by poorly run NFL franchises if you upset the ego of an owner
Decisions decisions
Agreed. Cignetti has it made at Illinois right now, even though Illinois wasn’t considered a top tier program before. They still have to continue their run to fully establish that reputation, but he’s done a ton putting them on the map. It’s nice to see a non-traditional power make it. The school is wise to keep him satisfied from a football perspective-it’s really hard to compete with the traditional powers in the NCAA, and he had the most remarkable season so far for a college team. I don’t know if Cignetti will jump to the pros, but he’s already made milestones at Illinois that’ll be etched in history. Good for him.
Indiana, not Illinois.
Illinois ???