How Indiana Quietly Became a Big Spender in Football

College football’s newest powerhouse resides in a state known for basketball. 

On Saturday, No. 7 Indiana upset top-ranked Oregon 30–20 to snap the Ducks’ 18-game home winning streak. The Hoosiers are currently 6–0 and ranked No. 3 in this week’s Associated Press poll, the highest ranking in program history. 

The Hoosiers were the darlings of the 2024 season, going 11–2 under first-year coach Curt Cignetti before losing to Notre Dame in the opening round of the College Football Playoff 27–17. 

But Saturday proved 2024 was no fluke and this year the Hoosiers can not only hang, but beat the sport’s elite teams. The win makes Cignetti perhaps the most sought-after coach in Power 4 with jobs such as Penn State open with the potential for more to follow. 

Poaching Cignetti might be easier said than done, though. IU’s athletic department has quietly increased its football spending since 2021 and is no longer in the Big Ten’s cellar for both its record and resources. 

Two Contracts in One Year

After a 10–0 start in 2024—and 11 months after he was hired—Indiana gave Cignetti a new contract. The eight-year deal lasts through the 2032 season and pays him $8.3 million a year with a $1 million retention bonus and additional performance-related bonuses that exceed $1 million. 

He’s the 19th highest-paid coach in the country according to USA Today and trailed just four Big Ten coaches at the start of the season in terms of compensation: Ryan Day (Ohio State), Lincoln Riley (USC), Dan Lanning (Oregon), Matt Rhule (Nebraska), and James Franklin (Penn State). Franklin was fired on Sunday. 

But Cignetti’s new deal also came with $11 million for his “on-field staff salary and support pool,” which ranks among the highest in the sport, according to the USA Today assistant coach salary database. Ohio State’s coaching staff pool for 10 on-field assistants for its national title team last season was $11.43 million, according to the Columbus Dispatch. Indiana’s pool for its football staff last season was $5.8 million. Cignetti’s second contract nearly doubled that. 

Spending Beyond the Staff

Cignetti could get another contract that vaults him into the sport’s top-10 highest paid coaches, and that doesn’t seem to be a problem for IU. Overall, the Hoosiers have increased their spending in football every year since 2021 when it was just less than $24 million, to $61.6 million a year ago, according to the Knight-Newhouse database. The 2024 season was the first since 2005 that IU exceeded the conference’s median in total football spending. 

The Hoosiers’ ramp-up in spending coincides with the university hiring Pam Whitten to be its president in 2021. Whitten came from Kennesaw State, but before that was at the University of Georgia, where she understood the top-down buy-in football requires for success. 

“I felt a real commitment from the president Pam Whitten and the athletic director Scott Dolson to get football going,” Cignetti told The Daily Hoosier in May. “I mean football generates 90% of the athletic revenue across the country, and they wanted to get it rolling. I think you can win anywhere in America with the proper commitment from the top.”

The Hoosiers also have an NIL warchest that’s competitive with the rest of the conference. After last year’s College Football Playoff berth, the team was able to retain most of its core rather than  losing it to the transfer portal and make some expensive additions, too. Quarterback Fernando Mendoza has emerged as a Heisman Trophy frontrunner and is being paid $2 million, according to CBS Sports. 

Cignetti regularly talks about how IU has one of the biggest alumni bases in the country, and his success has started to get the attention of some of the school’s richest. Billionaire Mark Cuban, who graduated from Indiana in 1981, has long been one of the school’s biggest academic donors, but never donated to the athletic department until December 2024, partially because of Cignetti, a fellow Pittsburgh native. 

It’s another reason why the Hoosiers aren’t worried about Cignetti getting poached, despite the bigger programs that will inevitably come calling. After IU lost to Notre Dame in the playoff, Cuban approached Dolson, with a message that, to him, signaled the Hoosiers’ arrival in football. “Scott, this is painful,” Cuban said, according to CBS Sports. “But isn’t it nice to not have to be thinking about whether or not you have to fire your coach for the first time in how many years?”