It’s great to be back in town for the Homecoming Game and giving Kelley Business School Private Equity Work Shop Lecture while I’m in town. It is awe-inspiring to see IU President Pam Whitten, AD Scott Dolson and the Board of Trustees move swiftly and decisively to structure a new long-term deal with Curt Cignetti. I know Curt and have watched him first and in my opinion, without any doubt, Cig is the finest and most experienced Head Football Coach in College Football today. Curt Cignetti is truly the Dean of all College Football Coaches! ! Terry
Zach Osterman | Indianapolis Star
Cignetti signed New new eight-year contract with IU on Thursday, upping his average annual pay to $11.6 million and locking him in through 2033.
IU has poured more than $100 million into Memorial Stadium improvements across the last 15 years, with more planned.
Donor energy is at all-time highs, with former players like Terry Tallen and prominent alumni like Mark Cuban part of the effort.
Cignetti’s refreshed contract signals another doubling down on football success, at a school whose administration understands the political importance of the sport in modern college athletics.
No. 3 Indiana hosts Michigan State for a renewal of its Old Brass Spittoon rivalry series at 3:30 p.m. Saturday in Bloomington. This weekend marks IU’s homecoming.BLOOMINGTON — So quickly did Curt Cignetti’s new, improved Indiana football contract come together, it was announced Thursday via tweet.
Well, tweets. First, one confirming the deal, accompanied by a picture of Cignetti at his desk in his office, signing a piece of paper. His preferred Glacier Freeze Gatorade Zero sat to one side.
Well, tweets. First, one confirming the deal, accompanied by a picture of Cignetti at his desk in his office, signing a piece of paper. His preferred Glacier Freeze Gatorade Zero sat to one side.
The second tweet contained a 46-second message accompanying Thursday’s news. Somewhere between signing and speaking, Cignetti must’ve taken a sip, because he didn’t bother to put the cap back on.
He had more important things to worry about.
“We’ve accomplished a lot here in a short amount of time,” Cignetti told the camera, “but still have a lot of work to do. I couldn’t be more proud to be a Hoosier, and I plan on retiring as a Hoosier.
“The way that this state has embraced us and our success in football has meant more to me than anything else. So, I just wanted to get on camera and let you know that Curt Cignetti is gonna work daily to make Indiana the best it can be.”
If there comes a time when we’re required to pinpoint the exact moment Indiana pivoted firmly to football, this might be it.
Nationally, Indiana’s success in football across the last two seasons is cast as the product of Cignetti’s genius. But it’s also a product of more than a decade of sustained investment in football at IU, investment that set the table for a coach of Cignetti’s considerable talent to thrive in a place where this was once considered impossible.
What is important to understand about Indiana football today isn’t that the good times will last forever and its coach will never leave. It’s that a school once conditioned to see football as something that passed the time until basketball season began has flipped that dynamic almost completely.
Indiana is a football school now, and it has both the money and the motivation to act like one.
A cultural commitment to Indiana football
Cignetti signaled as much in November, when — despite the potential appeal of perceived “bigger” jobs elsewhere — he signed an eight-year contract worth at least $72 million.“They came to me,” Cignetti said in an on-air interview with Fox’s “Big Noon Kickoff” the day the contract was confirmed. “They were very proactive.
“Some people say, ‘This one may open, that one may open, and you’re gonna be a hot commodity, and blah blah blah.’ The fact of the matter is, we’re the emerging superpower in college football. Why would I leave?”
Fans ate up the last bit, a declaration the No. 3-ranked Hoosiers have emphatically backed up through a 6-0 start to 2025.
More telling, though, might have been what he said first. Indiana, Cignetti suggested, played offense in securing him to fresh terms, rather than waiting to see whether another school might tempt him away.
The same can now be said of his third IU contract, one even richer at roughly $93 million guaranteed.
That aggressiveness reflects well more than a decade of escalating, focused spending to make IU football more relevant and successful than its modest modern history.
Grounded in the steady flow of Big Ten media rights dollars and anchored by a robust commitment, first from Fred Glass and now his successor, Scott Dolson, to get football right, Indiana has steadily ramped up its financial commitment to football since the late 2000s.
In 2010, for example, Indiana reported just shy of $13 million in football-specific spending. By 2024, even excluding severance payments, that number had climbed past $41 million.
Much of that is reflected in what created such a buzz in Bloomington this week: Coaching salaries.
In FY10, IU reported roughly $816,000 in head coach pay, and another $1.75 million in assistant coaches’ salaries. In the most recent fiscal year, those numbers landed at $6.37 million, and $7.85 million. In relative terms, those represent increases of approximately 960% and 450%, respectively, in fewer than 15 years.
Now, that number stands to climb again, this time into the sport’s highest tier.
Cignetti’s new deal will pay him an average annual value of $11.6 million. It’s also possible, perhaps likely, that his $11 million pool for hiring assistants and support staff — one that allowed him to retain all his coaches save one last offseason, and offer both his coordinators million-dollar contracts — will expand again with his new deal.
All that investment reflects improved earning on the front end. Indiana has seen the benefits in the form of quadrupled football-specific revenues. In the most recent fiscal year, IU reported north of $89 million in that category.
Yet that growth is not reflective purely of ever-inflating media rights dollars. According to the athletic department’s annual NCAA financial reports, football-specific rights revenues — IU tends to report them specifically, sport by sport — increased more than $36 million between 2010-24.
In that same span, football-specific spending ticked up nearly $50 million, and football-specific revenue grew by more than $67 million.
“When all is said and done,” Glass told IndyStar, “you’ve got to have the cumulative impact of investments.”
The results played out not just in salaries but also infrastructure.
IU’s staff expanded. The department poured more than $100 million into its athletics facilities, many of them football-facing first and foremost. Glass also allotted millions for smaller projects, like replacing practice fields with artificial turf for year-round use, and cleaning up the stadium cosmetically.
Kevin Wilson came from Oklahoma to show Indiana how a serious football program behaves. Tom Allen went one step further, proving IU could compete at the top end of the Big Ten.
Now — standing on those years of investment — Cignetti is taking the roof off.
“It’s everything we hoped for and envisioned,” Glass said. “We’ve got a first-class, Big Ten football venue, that’s full, and people are spilling over the edges. Things are organized around football, and they’re watching a team competing for the national championship that has captured the imagination of the country.”
‘The secret to success’
Glass is quick, in any conversation about IU football, to give Dolson credit.“Scott had the vision to see what the next iteration of success looked like,” Glass said. “He said, ‘I’m going to get a guy who’s got his staff intact, has a philosophy and culture intact, has a bunch of guys that can play immediately to implement his culture,’ and in this portal/NIL world, I think Scott figured out what the secret to success was before a lot of other people did.”
Nowhere does a job draw its appeal or potential in modern college football more than in the dual construct of revenue sharing and NIL.
The latter came first. IndyStar understands IU had a little under $2 million in its roster in Tom Allen’s final season, a number that has increased perhaps as much as fivefold for football specifically in the intervening years.
It’s not clear exactly where Indiana’s football-specific payroll — for lack of a more artful term — stands this season. But Dolson told IndyStar this summer football was slated to receive 70% to 75% of the department’s $20.5 million rev-share budget in Year 1, which roughs out at $15 million as a median estimate.
Like most schools with robust enough NIL setups, IU frontloaded its major deals with athletes this year, pushing them through before the NCAA clearinghouse came online. So next year’s numbers will likely look different, once they’re put through that process.
But IndyStar understands it’s possible, if not likely, Indiana’s roster cleared $20 million total this year.
Wins like Saturday’s upset at Oregon have already pushed the bar higher going forward. But more telling is the Hoosiers’ ability to recruit and retain a competitive roster simultaneously.
In back-to-back seasons, Cignetti landed multiple impact players from the transfer portal, including a quarterback named second-team All-Big Ten last season (Kurtis Rourke) and another considered a leading contender for the Heisman Trophy this season (Fernando Mendoza). All while losing just 13 players and 14 starters to the transfer portal after last season. Cignetti told the Bloomington Herald-Times this spring an unnamed program offered one of his players $1.5 million to enter the portal during the spring window, but that player didn’t budge.
“I get questions: ‘How are you going to sustain it?” Cignetti said at Big Ten media days in July. “We’re not looking to sustain it. We’re looking to improve it.”
All this comes at a time when departments can be more creative about providing “true NIL” deals that will satisfy the clearinghouse’s fair market value standard. As the clearinghouse process further clarifies itself — or steps back to legal challenge — those efforts will become more refined.
Given the success Indiana has had so far in the modern landscape, there’s no expectation of slowdown now.
“We’re certainly committed to giving coach Cig and his staff the opportunity to be successful on and off the field,” said Tyler Harris, executive director of IU’s partner collective, Hoosiers Connect. “We’re going to do our best to make sure he feels very, very supported.”
Donor energy skyrocketing to fund Indiana football NIL
Donor energy has arguably never been higher.Wins like Oregon reset the bar for what Indiana can achieve in the NIL space, and they reinforce the idea that if resourced adequately, Indiana football can compete on a national scale.
“It’s tangible. It’s real. People can see it. They can taste it. They can experience it,” said Terry Tallen, a captain on the Hoosiers’ 1979 Holiday Bowl-winning team. “We always believed we could get here.”
Tallen, whose $2 million gift underwrote a sweeping renovation of IU’s locker room in 2019, has also helped fund a clutch of scholarships. That locker room gift was the largest single donation by a former IU football player in the program’s history.
But it was not, Tallen says now, an aberration.
According to a recent report from alumni networking company Almabase, Indiana University now boasts the largest living alumni base in the country, at approximately 805,000. Energizing even just a fraction of them around Cignetti’s recent success changes the financial equation for his program.
“We knew that if people, alumni and leadership, wanted to make Indiana a football power they could,” Tallen said. “They paint us as these underdogs. We think we’re big-time. The alumni base doesn’t have an underdog mentality.
“Now, it’s all getting energized, organized and prioritized, and we’re seeing the results.”
That includes first-of-its-kind engagement from one of IU’s most high-profile alumni: Mark Cuban.
Reported first by CBS Sports and described only as “a big number,” it represented the first time Cuban has given directly to sports.
The former Dallas Mavericks owner has supported the department structurally, through initiatives like the Cuban Center for Sports Media and Technology. But this time, moved by Cignetti’s success, Cuban threw his weight behind the department’s on-field/on-court ambitions as well.
“I’m all in on IU,” Cuban told IndyStar via email, “and coach Cig.”
IU will stay aggressive
Dolson has more projects in the pipeline, like another significant Memorial Stadium renovation that would likely grapple with, among other things, modernizing the 65-year-old stadium’s press box and suite-level facilities.His department continues to claw open new revenue streams, like field-level suite seating, on-field naming rights and personal seat donations for season tickets at Memorial Stadium. He walks in lockstep with Whitten, his university president, who attends most games.
And working together with the department’s partner collective, IU remains committed to expanding NIL opportunities that make recruiting and retention more successful.
Still, Dolson knows his biggest investment — the one that makes everything else work smoothly — is sitting in the coach’s office overlooking Merchants Bank Field.
“We want to continue to make certain that we provide the resources to be able to be competitive at the highest levels,” Dolson told IndyStar, “and to understand what that means.”
Every game through the rest of this season is sold out, and IU figures to once again contribute to a hefty Big Ten payday from the College Football Playoff as well. Success, done right, becomes a virtuous circle, one Indiana football has locked in across the last two years.
“We’ve built on our successes all the way around, and all the things that are important to a program,” Cignetti said during a Thursday appearance on the Pat McAfee Show. “The games are sold out, the fans are crazy and nutty, giving has really increased, and we are getting more high-profile, high-power donors into the program, facilities are improving.”
No one inside the walls of the North End Zone facility, nor Bryan Hall, where the university administration is housed, will take anything for granted.
But IU’s present success did not, despite popular opinion, happen overnight. Having spent the best part of two decades working tirelessly toward this moment, the Hoosiers don’t plan on surrendering it now.
The same man who just signed his third contract in two years and declared his intention to retire at IU launched his tenure on a cold December night by declaring, “I’ve never taken a backseat to anybody, and don’t plan on starting now.”
Perhaps for the first time in its modern history, IU football doesn’t have to either.
“We’re definitely,” Cignetti told McAfee, “moving in the right direction.”