Curt Cignetti dropped the latest bomb in a war of words with ESPN that dates back to the 2024 season.
His undefeated 2025 national championship team was nominated for the “Best Team” honor at this week’s ESPY Awards, a program operated by the sports network. The Hoosiers were certainly a worthy nominee after completing major college football’s first 16-0 season since 1894. The rags to riches turnaround story is one of the most improbable in the history of all sports.
At least nine members of the 2025 IU football team were at the ESPY Awards.
But instead the NBA’s New York Knicks were named the Best Team at the ESPY ceremony in New York. The Knicks were just the No. 3 seed in the East and then went on to a dominant postseason run. While their NBA title ended a franchise drought, it wasn’t historic on the scale of what IU accomplished.
As he’s prone to do from time to time, Indiana’s head coach noticed the slight.
“You know, that natty 16-0 hadn’t happened in 136 years,” Cignetti said Friday on the Pat McAfee Show. “Now, how that team doesn’t win a certain award as the team of the year, you know, but some networks are consistent at getting it wrong.”
Cignetti didn’t have to worry about frustrating a Big Ten media partner with that comment. ESPN is not part of the league’s massive broadcasting rights deal he says helped lure him to IU in the first place.
This back-and-forth has been ongoing for a while.
Several commentators from ESPN and its sister companies owned by Disney have taken cheap shots at Cignetti and IU, especially following their 2024 College Football Playoff loss at Notre Dame. Resident ESPN SEC shill Paul Finebaum seemed to take weekly digs at the Hoosiers before eventually being forced to acknowledge he had it all wrong.
In the case of the ESPY Awards, McAfee, a vocal IU supporter who works for ESPN, informed Cignetti that fan voting heavily influenced the outcome rather than the network. With that, Cignetti pulled back some.
“You’re not beating them (New York fans), and there’s a lot of deserving teams in there,” Cignetti said.
But always in search of an edge, Cignetti had already said what he felt needed to be said. This probably won’t be the end of his exchange with ESPN. And that’s probably how both sides want it.
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