Cignetti's New Massive Contract is Fascinating

Curt Cignetti is now very rich. And the IU Daily Hoosier and many other publications had articles about this if you want to read them for yourself. But the IU Daily Hoosier did a deep dive into Cignetti's contract. So Curt Cignetti is the IU football coach. Turned IU from arguably the worst program in college football to the best in two years. It's an incredible story. We talked about this a little bit yesterday. Some of the magic and lure of it is gone because these players now a lot of them are basically almost like paid mercenaries who just hop from one college to the next. But inside of the rules that everybody plays by, Curt Cignetti, he's pretty much mastered it. He's pretty much pulled it off, right? And what IU did this year was absolutely incredible. What he's done over two years is incredible. He deserves every penny that he's about to that I'm about to read you about. So he is now going to make this coming year more than 13 million dollars to coach football. He's going to make more than 13 million dollars to coach football according to the Daily Hoosier. And what happened was he had a clause in his contract that if IU made the national semifinal for the football, which they obviously did, they won the national championship, that they had to, it triggered what they called a good faith market review according to the IU Daily Hoosier. And he gets to renegotiate his contract. And the good faith renegotiation had to put him among the three highest paid football coaches in college football. Now think about if you're IU football and you're making that deal in 23. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you make it to the semifinal, we'll make you one of the three highest paid coaches in college football. Yeah, yeah. Sure, Curt, go ahead. Throw that in there. That'll be fine. Look, this is a bad problem for IU to have because they won the national championship. But I'm sure when he put that in there, like sometimes agents will just throw things in there. Well, why not? You might as well ask for it. And now he pulled it off. And now he's going to be the second highest paid coach in college football behind Kirby Smart of Georgia. It's the only coach believed to be higher paid than Curt Cignetti is Kirby Smart of Georgia. Now what I found interesting about this deal is how Cignetti actually gets paid. His base salary of the 13 million, the more than 13 million according to the Daily Hoosier is only $500,000. This is fascinating how the University has structured this deal because you hear this and you go, "Well, that's disgusting. How is he making all this money?" This is fascinating. His base salary from the University is only $500,000. The rest comes from outside marketing and promotional income. So they basically set him up to where the people who, it's almost like his own NIL, where the people who back the University, they're paying the tab. Apparently, and the story doesn't go into great detail on this, but the elevation is over outside groups saying, "Okay, we'll pay you to endorse this. We'll pay to be a part of this," blah, blah, blah. So really, they've set it up now to where they're not even footing the tab because of your donor base, which brings you to a bigger conversation about college athletics and to the conversation we had yesterday about Trump on March the 6th. He's supposed to convene all of these big players in college athletics to have a conversation about how to deal with NIL. Even in coaching, college football, college basketball is becoming the haves versus the have-nots. There's no way some smaller school can compete with this. There's no way some smaller school has that sort of donor base, alumni base. IU, and this came out in the college football playoffs, has the largest living alumni base in the country. That's amazing, isn't it? That means they have, essentially, and look at some of the names of the people. We're not dealing with people that are working at a Wendy's. It's people like Mark Cuban. IU has the ability, which then kind of blows your mind that they can't get the basketball thing together, doesn't it? It does kind of blow your mind that they can't get the basketball thing together, but they essentially have unlimited money from outside of the university itself. Now, one of the things, again, you look at, if you're a regular person, are you okay with the continued elevation of salaries inside of college athletics, salaries both to the coaches and to the players? People have long lamented the special benefits given to coaches while the players had all these strict rules around them. I think there was probably some merit to that in which the transfer rules for years didn't allow a kid to leave or punish the kid for leaving, had to sit out of a kid left, but a coach could leave at any time. It's probably pretty fair, but Curt Cignetti earned every penny of it. He's super, super rich. I wish he was my friend. If anyone knows, if any of you guys know how to get a hold of Curt Cignetti, let him know. He's totally welcome on this podcast. He'll be floored with how beautiful our studio is, and we could help him a lot when it comes to spending that 13 plus million dollars.