College football hasn’t been the same since November 30, 2023.
Curt Cignetti’s arrival at Indiana began one of the greatest turnarounds in the sport’s history — and, really, in any sport. He took over a program coming off three straight losing seasons and without a postseason victory in more than 30 years. His Hoosiers shrugged at that history and won a program-record 11 games in 2024 with a remarkable College Football Playoff appearance, and then they went several steps further last season with a 16-0 campaign ending in Big Ten and national championships.
Cignetti’s tenure in Bloomington has coincided with a lot of changes within college football at large, as NIL and pay-for-play continues evolving and as the transfer portal has grown in importance and changed timelines. Those things would’ve happened even if Cignetti never stepped foot in Bloomington. But the Hoosiers ascension into a power player in college football has undoubtedly impacted the sport.
IU is at the table
Indiana football might never be considered a true “blue blood.” That label is, obviously, highly subjective; winning a national championship — or, even, multiple — won’t change the sport’s history.
But after two straight College Football Playoff appearances and the 2025 national title, and a promising 2026 team strongly favored to return to the CFP, IU is undoubtedly competing in that class.
The Hoosiers are at the table with some of the top recruits in the country, whether out of high school or the transfer portal. And there’s no reason to think Cignetti’s program will go away anytime soon, both on the field and on the recruiting trail. Indiana had two first-round picks in the 2026 NFL Draft, and early projections for 2027 indicate two or three players with first-round potential in Charlie Becker, Nick Marsh, and Carter Smith.
He’s orchestrated a remarkable transformation in Bloomington, and that impacts the entire sport. Other top programs around the country will have to compete with Indiana in ways they rarely, if ever, have in the past. This is just reality in college football now. IU is no longer an afterthought.
Clocks tick faster
FBS saw 33 coaching changes this offseason. Not all occurred for strictly performance reasons — many coaches simply accepted a new job elsewhere, creating a vacancy at their abandoned program, and off-field situations like Michigan endured with Sherrone Moore led to other openings.
But plenty of schools wound up relieving their head coaches, pretty early in their tenures, due to performance. The same year Cignetti started at IU, DeShaun Foster and Jonathan Smith took over at UCLA and Michigan State, respectively. The Bruins and Spartans both moved on, with Foster getting the axe midseason and Smith at the end of November. Oregon State and Stanford both also fired coaches after two years, and Auburn, UAB, and Coastal Carolina made coaching changes after three seasons.
Accelerated timelines and heightened expectations are just part of the gig as a college football coach; things have trended that direction for years. But as the country has watched Cignetti take over the losingest program in the sport’s history and turn it into a national champion, many other schools questioned why they couldn’t do the same thing. Programs mired in mediocrity have started to dream big and wonder if someone could do for them what Cignetti did with the Hoosiers. Historically successful programs must now use IU as a measuring stick, and some have — and will continue to — make coaching changes to put themselves back in college football’s top tiers.
This trend will be worth monitoring this year into the 2026-27 offseason. Many of the coaching moves from this past offseason occurred after the regular season ended but before the College Football Playoff concluded. Now that Cignetti finished off the national championship, and seemingly has IU in position to win again this year, there could be even more programs whose patience has worn thinner. It could continue being increasingly rare for a coach to get more than two seasons without results on the field.
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