“They Schedule Like Cowards”: Curt Cignetti & Indiana Lose Respect as College Football Insider Admits Sad Reality
from Ameek Abdullah Jamal with Essentially College Football
The Hoosiers dream season will be made into a movie someday. What that film will not include is the media backlash that their scheduling has been receiving as of late. To suggest that Cignetti only won because he chose cupcake opponents is doing him a disservice, as his team beat up the heavyweights like Miami and Oregon during the playoffs.
But to suggest that his methods could be damaging what the soul of college football used to represent is also not too far from the truth.
First, we need to see what is actually happening. Winning a national title usually buys you endless respect. For example, LSU fans are still living in the afterglow from their 2019 season. But all Indiana has been getting recently is a media circus.
Analysts are roasting head coach Curt Cignetti and the Indiana front office, claiming they’re hiding behind a laughably soft non-conference schedule to guard their playoff spot. On The Brandon Walker Show, the Barstool Sports insider put the Hoosiers on blast for ducking real competition.
“My gut says no,” Walker said when asked if this would finally be the year that Cignetti and Indiana get humbled. “They schedule like cowards. They’re national champs, and they scheduled nobody out of conference because they schedule like p—–. Or will they get humbled? No, they will not. Because there’s no more than two losses on that schedule. They’re going to the playoff again.”
When his co-host tried to defend the Hoosiers by pointing out that non-conference slates are locked in years ahead of time, Walker cut him off. He told the panel to stop making excuses for the administration, stressing that Indiana has made a conscious choice to wipe elite opponents off its future calendars.
The stats back up Walker’s frustration. Indiana enters the 2026 season with a Strength of Schedule ranking near the bottom of the Big Ten elite, sitting at No. 33 nationally, as per ESPN’s Football Power Index. Why? Because their September schedule features North Texas, Howard, and Western Kentucky, not a single Power Four program in sight.
You have to trace all the way back to September 2023, when they lost to Louisville, to find the last time the Hoosiers lined up against a marquee out-of-conference opponent in the regular season.
The paper trail shows this was a deliberate strategy. To clear their path, Indiana paid a hefty $500,000 buyout to ditch a series with Virginia, backed away from Louisville, and recently scrapped their marquee 2030–2031 home-and-home series against Notre Dame.
As a result, the Hoosiers don’t have any regular-season Power Four opponents on their non-conference schedule for the next seven years. Cignetti and the athletic department are leaning hard into the strategy of coasting through September to save their energy for the grueling Big Ten gauntlet.
This brings to light a pretty sad reality in modern college football, where winning the game has started to matter more than playing it. In the new playoff system, a 10-2 or 11-1 record gets you into the tournament, and nobody on the playoff committee cares if you beat up on weak teams in September.
That is also what makes the media backlash so intense. Indiana proved they can beat anyone when they blew out Alabama and overcame Miami during their legendary 2025 national championship run. They have the talent to stand toe-to-toe with the elite. But by choosing to play host to sub-par programs every September instead of testing themselves against Power Four rivals, Curt Cignetti and the Indiana front office are trading some old fashioned respect for certain guaranteed wins.
So, yeah, they definitely aren’t strangers to elite competition when the trophies are on the line. But that brings up the question: why snub them when you know you could beat pretty much every Power Four program?
The Hypocrisy In Hating The Hoosiers
Now, comes the other side. College football has always been a game of who has the edge over others. This holier than thou attitude of playing the game the right way is for when the staff were facing the cameras. Behind the scenes, an underground economy was alive.
Boosters would funnel cash and other incentives to get the best recruits. This has now mostly been negated due to the introduction of the NIL. But these programs are still considered successful because they won. For a long time, that was all that mattered.
So when Curt Cignetti figured out that winning on the gridiron is a matter of attrition over pride, he unlocked a path to the Natty that previous head coaches had already walked on. In 2025, Huskies coach Jedd Fisch criticized the SEC’s scheduling practices. You see, the Big Ten used to play nine conference opponents per year at that time, while the SEC only had to play eight.
Furthermore, the SEC teams used to schedule an FCS opponent in the month of November, usually before rivalry week. While the rest of the country was playing high-stakes, physical conference rivalry games, SEC powerhouses essentially took a week off.
“The NFL doesn’t play the CFL in the middle of the season,” Fisch said.
But none of those programs received nearly the amount of backlash that Indiana has been getting. Is it because somewhere the Hoosiers are breaking the rules of who gets to be the top dog in the sport? Perhaps, it can also be due to the fact that most of the SEC has to deal with each other in their new 9-game conference gauntlet. There is an air of bitterness that is hard to miss.
Keeping the hypocrisy aside, there are real consequences to what Cignetti is doing. Steve Sarkisian bemoaned his loss to Ohio State, saying his team could have got into the postseason if they hadn’t played them in the opening weekend. Despite that fact being true, imagine what the fans would have missed out on had that actually happened.
The battle between the yet untested superstar in Arch Manning and the still unknown Julian Sayin was one of the best opening slate games of the year. It was Lee Corso’s last appearance on GameDay. If Sarkisian had followed Cignetti’s philosophy, we would have never got that game. A core memory missed for everyone.
It cannot be allowed to continue as this trend would ensure that conferences keep battling only among themselves and would only dare to meet each other in the postseason. Early September would turn into a snooze fest with cupcake opponents coming over to take a beating for some well earned cash for their poorly budgeted athletic programs.
The answer is not complicated. It’s already been done and as usual, the first beneficiary was Alabama. The Crimson Tide became the first program to qualify for the playoffs having 3 losses and not having to win their conference. A three-loss team had never received an at-large spot before. The selection committee chose to value Alabama’s brutal strength of schedule and top-tier wins, placing them into the bracket at the expense of a two-loss Notre Dame team.
This needs to be codified into the playoff selection rules. The opponents you face have to matter. This would bring better football to us early on. Teams would dare to try and challenge the biggest programs in the sport to get a win that would matter more during postseason selection, than if they had beaten a team much lower in talent.
But until that becomes practice, Indiana and Curt Cignetti will not be the only ones dropping tougher opponents early on in their season. Hating on Cignetti is the easy route to take. That disappointment needs to be directed at the NCAA and CFP to change the rules so that this trend stops before it can reach other teams.