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First, my kid and her friends are still quoting that AI-garbage wrestling podcast that went unbelievably far off the rails. I think about that while reading about college teams using AI in recruiting.
Full Circle: ‘Beat the s— out of them’
In this past season’s College Football Playoff, we got a perfect story: Indiana, the most unforeseen title favorite in the history of the sport, would have to bring down an Alabama empire desperately clinging to power.
Yesterday, May 4, was Star Wars Day, so: Luke versus Vader, live at the Rose Bowl.
And for Curt Cignetti, that paternal rivalry (spoiler alert) might have felt somewhat close to real. In 2007, Nick Saban’s Alabama plucked him from NC State, hiring him as receivers coach and recruiting coordinator, and in differing ways, the two leveled each other up. “Saban’s unrelenting standards, his attention to details, his recruiting methods and motivational tactics — Cignetti geeked out on all of it.”
Now return to this January’s scene in Pasadena:
💬 Cignetti once helped Saban build Alabama into the overlord of college football for a decade and a half. Now, as the Tide’s CFP quarterfinal opponent in Pasadena, he made it his personal mission to embarrass DeBoer’s Crimson Tide.
💬 “In the game day meeting at the hotel, he was like, ‘I don’t want to do any trick plays, weird stuff,’” said (strength coach Derek Owings). “‘I want to line up and beat the s— out of them.’ In the second half, we started bullying those guys, and when Bama had given up, it was, ‘I don’t really want to pass anymore. I want to run it down their throat and make a statement.’”
💬 Which they did, 38-3.
Sure, Cignetti wants to beat the s— out of every opponent, especially helpless Purdue. But based on that comment, it’s hard not to wonder whether the game against Alabama was personal.
But why? Did he feel a need to bring down the machine after once drawing parts of its blueprint? Do crimson teams just hate other crimson teams?
For my theory, look at Indiana’s experience in the prior season’s Playoff:
💬 The Irish held a 27-3 lead with 4:50 left before two garbage-time IU touchdowns made the final score 27-17. The backlash toward Indiana was immediate.
💬 “Indiana was outclassed in that game,” Kirk Herbstreit said on “GameDay” the next morning. “They were not a team that should have been on that field when you consider other teams that could have been there.”
💬 “We didn’t say much about it,” Cignetti said of those comments. “But we all heard it, felt it and used it as fuel.”
To be clear, even without knowing about Indiana’s 2025 title run, it was absurd for people to immediately argue 2024 Indiana shouldn’t have been in that Playoff.
Much of that chatter was due to the small-sample-size effect of Indiana-Notre Dame being the only game on the first Friday night of the 12-team era, making it ripe for dramatic overreactions on not just the upstart Hoosiers, but on the format in general.
But if Indiana hadn’t been in 2024’s bracket, which team would’ve taken its place? That would’ve been … DeBoer’s 9-3 Alabama, the next team in the rankings.
In short, the thing to keep in mind is this: In 2024, to call Indiana undeserving after it’d only lost to Ohio State and Notre Dame was to argue the Hoosiers’ spot should’ve gone to a Bama team that’d lost to two 6-6 opponents.
Imagine you’re Cignetti, readying for the biggest game in your career, your school’s first Rose Bowl since 1967. Imagine it’d taken you four decades of coaching just to reach a job as big as Indiana. And imagine your Pasadena opponent is the team that’d allegedly been more worthy than you the year prior, thanks almost entirely to its name brand.
With all that in mind, I’m kinda impressed Bama scored a field goal.
What’s the lesson here? Two familiar takeaways: One, don’t piss off Cignetti. And two, letting underdogs compete can help them become true contenders, expanding the number of fan bases that get to invest in the sport. Let’s remember that each December, when we get the now-annual media barrage in favor of the Playoff being nothing but the 12 most famous programs.
Those two big quotes above come from Stewart Mandel’s new must-read on Cignetti. I think it’s instantly the definitive story (and the comment section seems to agree) on a coach who bet on himself over and over again, even if it once meant leaving Saban’s behemoth to take over a dead-end Division II job.
Quick Snaps
💡 “You’ll never be able to run away from it. Why not lean into it?” He works 84 hours a week, making $40,000 to coach at a Division III school surrounded by farms. And after everything Dion Jordan has been through, both before and after he was a No. 3 pick out of Oregon, he’s happy. The school is called Eureka. (I’m gonna read this again now.)
📰 News:
“Brendan Sorsby has retained prominent sports labor lawyer Jeffrey Kessler.” Familiar name in college sports.
Fernando Mendoza doesn’t plan to attend Indiana’s White House visit. That day, he’ll apparently be busy preparing for Raiders practices that will begin a week later. On brand.
Once again the Joker to Mendoza’s Batman, Diego Pavia reveals he overslept and missed pregame warm-ups against Bama. I hope these two continue delivering news items together forever.
🏆 Other college sports:
Our new women’s college hoops (and all other women’s hoops) newsletter, No Offseason, is now live.
“Nebraska, Penn State, Florida, SMU to play volleyball exhibition with $1 million in NIL prizes.”
The Hoosiers appear first in Brendan Marks’ list of the men’s hoops teams going the hardest in the portal. Oh, like that’s ever worked in Bloomington before?
Weekly softball home runs update: Oklahoma, led by Kendall “Softball T-1000” Wells, is the SEC’s No. 1 seed. UCLA’s Megan Grant is just one homer behind, though. Prep for the WCWS in three weeks.
New college baseball Top 25, with Kansas (!) in the top 10.
Campus Green: A billion a year … with NIL worries
Two interesting news items from the same day (Friday):
Big Ten schools receive record $1.37 billion from 2024-25 fiscal year. (The SEC is also in the nine-figures-a-year category.)
Michigan coach Kyle Whittingham calls for cap on NIL spending.
Well, there we have the current encapsulation of the debate college sports has been having with itself for over a century: Lots of money is coming in, so who gets to have it?
Whittingham’s overall point is reasonable, since he was referring to the arms race, the pressure on every team to “keep up and embrace that or embrace irrelevance.” He predicted, “There’s going to be several teams in this ’27 recruiting cycle that are $50 million-plus rosters.”
Do we want to see the sport’s richest tier continue to separate itself forever? The only way to limit that is to spread the wealth somehow, like pro leagues do, which I guess could theoretically involve forcing Wolverines boosters to slide a few bucks to ULM. (FWIW, Whittingham’s new team is far more likely to enter that $50M club than his old team, Utah … especially now that he’s publicly implied it’s what he’ll need in order to win championships.)
The weirdest wrinkle in college sports’ situation is that NIL comes from outside sources, not from a school’s ticket sales or a conference’s TV money. Capping it would be slightly like telling Lakers players they can only do as many endorsements as Hornets players do. Lawyers, assemble!
Logistically, a national NIL cap sounds beyond impossible, like trying to lasso galaxies with a noodle. Power 4 teams can’t agree on how to regulate individual NIL payments, let alone en masse. Some schools are already blowing past the current, court-established salary cap, the one intended to limit how much money schools themselves can pay athletes.
(I’ll once again note it’d be more feasible to cap the salaries of head coaches, but the guys in charge never seem to bring that one up.)
In short, until major college sports fully accepts it’s a professional sporting association affiliated with colleges, the train will never return to the station. Secret: It left in the 1800s, before most of America had either trains or stations.
Last week’s most-clicked: The Pac-12’s very spiritual explanation of its new logo.
Remember, email me at untilsaturday@theathletic.com with any college sports questions you’d like us to answer over the summer! (For the answer to the common question, “Do players still go to class?”, see this Mandel mailbag. I’ll come back to that soon, though. Send some Qs other than that one!)
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