What is Curt Cignetti’s buyout? Indiana Hoosiers football coach’s buyout figure increases by $10 million with new extension

What is Curt Cignetti’s buyout? Indiana Hoosiers football coach’s buyout figure increases by $10 million with new extension originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

Indiana Hoosiers football coach Curt Cignetti signed an eight-year, $92.8 million extension on Thursday, ensuring that he’ll be the driving force behind IU athletics for the foreseeable future. Cignetti’s team is ranked No. 3 in the country after a 6-0 start in 2025 and is coming off a College Football Playoff appearance in 2024.

With the new deal, Cignetti’s buyout has increased from $5 million to $15 million, per On3’s Alec Lasley. That means it’d cost any interested school a pretty penny to get Cignetti out of that deal. It’d also cost the Hoosiers big-time to dump him, though pigs flying seems more likely to happen at this point than Indiana ever voluntarily booting Cignetti.

Of course, things change. Once upon a time, you could’ve said the same thing about the Oklahoma State Cowboys and Mike Gundy. Or even the Penn State Nittany Lions and James Franklin. Both are in the unemployment line now.

IU has serious momentum in NIL spend due to Mark Cuban, Sidney and Lois Eskenazi, and Jane Fortune, though, and should continue to attract quality recruits to Bloomington.

Cignetti is built for this era. And so are the Hoosiers.

Indiana is a ‘football school’ in the Curt Cignetti era

As The Indianapolis Star’s Gregg Doyel noted, Cignetti and IU are in complete alignment. Indiana is now a football school, and it has proved that with recent personnel decisions.

“IU and Curt Cignetti deserve each other, too. President Pam Whitten and athletic director Scott Dolson have made a staggering commitment to Cignetti, forming a president-AD-coach alignment you rarely see in football. The Hoosiers’ defensive coordinator, Bryant Haines, earns $2 million a year, and will be earning $2.2 million in 2027. The mighty Southern California football program, coached by Oklahoma turncoat Lincoln Riley, tried to hire away Cignetti’s strength-and-conditioning coach, Derek Owings, after this past season,” Doyel wrote. “Here’s what Whitten, Dolson and Cignetti did:

“They made Owings the third-highest-paid S&C coach in the country.

“Only a football school does that. Indiana did that.”

Cignetti is approaching Nick Saban-levels of autonomy with the Hoosiers. Making Indiana relevant after the Big Ten added the USC Trojans, UCLA Bruins, Oregon Ducks, and Washington Huskies is a big enough deal to warrant it.