Indiana Hoosiers football coach Curt Cignetti has been the Grim Reaper in the Big Ten during the 2025 season.
Cignetti ended Tim Skipper’s momentum to become the UCLA Bruins’ full-time head coach after a 56-6 blowout in Bloomington on Saturday that has reporters of the team hoping Westwood sees a similar rebuild to IU’s.
Cignetti could also be part of the evidence that Jonathan Smith isn’t the guy to lead the Michigan State Spartans in the NIL era. As if the 38-13 beatdown the Hoosiers put on the Spartans in Week 8, and a 47-10 trampling in 2024 in East Lansing, wasn’t enough.
The Athletic’s Stewart Mandel believes Cignetti’s overnight success at Indiana will lead to shorter leashes for the likes of Smith, who’s 8-12 in his first two seasons and coming off a 31-20 loss to the Michigan Wolverines in The Battle for the Paul Bunyan Trophy on Saturday.
“It’s not looking good for second-year Spartans coach Jonathan Smith, now 3-11 in Big Ten play. His Oregon State success came as part of a slow rebuild, and no one in college football has patience for rebuilds anymore. Thanks, Curt Cignetti,” Mandel wrote.
The Lansing State Journal’s Graham Couch relayed that it’s not a matter of if, but when, Smith’s tenure at MSU would come to a close.
“The entire Smith chapter of MSU football hasn’t been good enough. Not his two games against Michigan. Not the last four weeks. Not his decisions in games or his team’s on-field discipline. There just hasn’t been enough competent or promising football, or any games where it all comes together. The performance is rarely surprising in a good way,” Couch wrote.
“MSU needed a surprisingly good performance Saturday night, a showing that made people see the state of things differently, see Smith differently. It didn’t happen. Saturday was a last gasp. And so now it’s just a matter of time. The only question is when.”
When could be soon. Cignetti has reset the market with his eight-year, $93 million extension that has a fully guaranteed buyout.
For coaches like Smith, whose $33 million buyout is a tough, but necessary pill to swallow, and whose results don’t cut it, it means being yet another Cignetti casualty.
