Here’s the problem with what Curt Cignetti just said about ‘adopting an SEC scheduling philosophy’
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Let’s just say that Curt Cignetti won’t be making any SEC friends anytime soon. Fortunately for the Indiana coach, he’ll do everything in his power to make sure he’s never face to face with anybody from the SEC … or anyone that’s barely considered a Power Conference team like Virginia.
That was a shot at Cignetti because in case you missed it, he took a direct one at the SEC. On the heels of Indiana canceling a home-and-home with Virginia, Cignetti offered this jab at the SEC.
What Cignetti is trying to say is that because SEC teams are only required to play 9 Power Conference games, he didn’t think it made sense for IU to continue playing a Power Conference foe seeing as how the Big Ten has a 9-game conference schedule. Hence, why the series with mighty Virginia was canceled. Cignetti, as he’s been doing since he called out Michigan and Ohio State before he ever coached a game in Bloomington, chose a more blunt way to take aim at the SEC.
Yeah, I don’t want to hear it. Not from him. Not from the guy who said on College GameDay ahead of Indiana’s first Playoff game that “we don’t just beat top-25 teams, we beat the s— out of them” … only to then lose by double digits in the second time in as many opportunities against top-25 foes.
I don’t want to hear that from him. Not when his got all the scheduling breaks that a Playoff-bound team could’ve gotten by virtue of not having to beat a single AP Top-25 team (at the time of the matchup) to reach the Playoff.
There’s a tiny part of me that understands the point that Cignetti is attempting to make that I’ll get to in a bit here, but I feel the need to clarify something that I probably should’ve led with.
I’m an Indiana graduate. A proud one.
That’s right. I had some of the best times of my life in Bloomington, including meeting my future wife and getting married there. Shoutout, Kilroy’s.
I salute the attitude that Cignetti came into Bloomington with because I know that in my college experience and for so many other fellow IU grads, the only students who attended football games were freshmen who didn’t understand yet that the tailgate was the only appointment viewing of a fall Saturday. In 1 year, he changed that. Even if Cignetti never gets IU back to the Playoff, he already exceeded expectations, and you’d better believe that seeing my alma mater hosting College GameDay was as prideful as I’ve ever felt for my school, even if I haven’t ever considered myself a true Indiana football fan.
So trust me when I say that sequence of events — canceling a home-and-home with a program that hasn’t had a winning season in the 2020s and then admitting he did so because he felt SEC teams had it easier than IU — bothered me. Shoot, it should bother Indiana fans who would ideally like to see nonconference games against teams that pack more of a punch than Western Kentucky.
I won’t dig into Cignetti’s issue with the SEC having 15 FCS matchups while conveniently ignoring that 14 Big Ten teams have an FCS game on their schedules. I won’t even dig into the fact that the SEC’s list of headliner nonconference matchups trumps the Big Ten’s nonconference games in a way that’s not even worth showing in side-by-side fashion. It’s not even worth digging into the fact that Alabama and South Carolina, AKA 2 of the SEC teams who competed with Indiana for a Playoff spot, both have 2 Power Conference foes in nonconference play this year.
The issue worth digging into is that a Big Ten coach like Cignetti was only in that position to begin with because of what, exactly?
Oh, that’s right. Greed. Specifically, Big Ten greed.
The biggest disagreement with Big Ten and SEC fans is over the number of conference games played. Laced somewhere in that direct shot by Cignetti was an understanding that Big Ten teams don’t think it’s right that they have to play 9 conference games while the SEC is still at 8. Cignetti and other Big Ten teams should ask themselves a question.
Who was the conference who went from 8 to 9 games in 2016? The Big Ten. And why was that done? Because it wanted more TV revenue. It got that. What it didn’t get was this remarkable support from the College Football Playoff selection committee, who then left the Big Ten’s conference champion out of the Playoff in the first 3 years of that 9-game conference schedule (2016-18). And yet, what did you hear from Big Ten coaches at that time? A puffed-out chest about a 9-game conference schedule and how it was a gauntlet that was tougher than the SEC’s.
Nobody brought up at the time that the Big Ten was still searching for a team outside of Ohio State to win a national title in the 21st century, or that the conference hadn’t had consecutive national title winners since the Lyndon B. Johnson administration (that drought finally ended this past season). Nope.
The maddening part about hearing Cignetti take a shot at the SEC while attempting to “adopt” the SEC’s scheduling philosophy was that the Big Ten made this move to a 9-game conference schedule without the Playoff as priority No. 1. The SEC, for all of its flaws, has always kept the Playoff as the No. 1 thing when it came to scheduling. That’s why it won’t announce a conference schedule for 2026 until after the new Playoff formula is decided. It took this long for Big Ten schools to start adding FCS teams and scheduling just 9 Power Conference games. It took this long for Big Ten teams like Indiana to realize that there might be a method to the SEC’s madness. And this realization for Big Ten folks like Cignetti is now coming from a place of elitism.
He doesn’t represent all Big Ten teams, but there were plenty of Big Ten fans who nodded their heads as he spoke out against the number of Power Conference games that teams should be playing. Everyone is acting in their own best interests, perhaps now more than ever. Cignetti felt that IU’s best interest were making the Playoff path slightly easier, even though he’s been around long enough to know that a PR hit was coming. You can’t be both the “Google me” guy and the “cancel Virginia” guy.
Some would argue he turned that into a PR victory by firing at the SEC. Others, like myself, would argue his frustration should go back to the Big Ten decision-makers a decade earlier.
Either way, Cignetti is conveniently ignoring the fact that the main culprit is within his own conference. It took more than a decade for the Big Ten to realize it had the wrong approach to competing for championships. Maybe it finally adopted a championship philosophy.
Surely Cignetti will get to find out soon enough now that IU’s championship path no longer goes through Virginia.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
