Scott Dolson wanted Indiana football coach Curt Cignetti to know ‘how much we’re committed’

• Indiana University has signaled a major shift in focus, prioritizing its football program.
• Coach Curt Cignetti signed a new eight-year, $93 million contract extension.
• Cignetti stated his intention to retire as a Hoosier, easing concerns he might leave for another job.

BLOOMINGTON — Indiana is a football school now. Adjust accordingly.

Of the many things Curt Cignetti’s new eight-year, $93 million contract signaled when it broke abruptly Thursday afternoon, understand that first. And recognize it as most important.

This place that has been for so long synonymous with basketball — so smitten with the game it learned to love during the cold, dark winter between harvest and planting — is now all in on football at a level there’s really no going back from.

“I couldn’t be more proud to be a Hoosier, and I plan on retiring as a Hoosier,” Cignetti said in a short video posted to IU football’s Twitter account Thursday. “The way that this state has embraced us and our success in football has meant more to me than anything else. So, I just wanted to get on camera and let you know that Curt Cignetti is gonna work daily to make Indiana the best it can be.”

His words firmed up what his department’s dollars, his donors’ investment and his team’s performances have all illustrated across the last 22 months:

Indiana has been completely recoded. Football comes first here, and football is flying.

Cignetti’s new contract — negotiated in the shadow of a coaching carousel expected to be among the busiest and most robust in recent memory — likely ensures he is going nowhere.

It reflects years of steady, stubborn investment in football from an athletic department and a university assured for a generation the sport was a hopeless enterprise in this part of the world. Thanks to both Cignetti’s success, and the sport’s reimagined conventions around roster planning, construction and development, that old wisdom now looks foolish.

Saturday’s win at Oregon, arguably the most important and impressive in program history, stands as testament to Cignetti’s ability.

But it also reflects a decade and a half spent shoring up the foundations of a football program athletic director Scott Dolson — like Fred Glass before him — believed was capable of this. All it needed was to hand the right tools to the right coach.

The tools came first. Indiana spent more than $100 million on facilities, increased coaching salaries more than ninefold, invested media rights revenues by the sack full and, yes, even paid a big-boy buyout along the way.

The belief was always that this moment could and would arrive. That if IU just didn’t quit, eventually it would find a man to meet both the moment and the money. It is impossible now to suggest Cignetti doesn’t fit that description.

Thursday’s news signaled more than that, though. It also reflected an urgency both Dolson and university President Pam Whitten feel to ensure Indiana’s agency in football keeps the Hoosiers in the picture as college athletics shrinks its top table.

Both Dolson and Whitten know football is the currency that keeps not just a program or a department but perhaps an entire university relevant in the modern landscape.

IU acted this quickly, in the wake of one big job (Penn State) already opening, because it knew it needed to keep what it has.

Per an IndyStar source, Cignetti’s buyout in his new contract rises from $10 million (which it would have been after Dec. 1) to $15 million. And there are likely to be further sweetened incentives included, like an expanded staffing pool, and possibly promises of even greater revenue-sharing and name, image and likeness investment into a roster that stayed together impressively from Cignetti’s first year in Bloomington to his second.

In fans’ minds, Cignetti’s own words — “I plan on retiring a Hoosier” — probably offered the greatest comfort.

Actions, though, speak loudest. Cignetti’s willingness to sign a third contract in less than two seasons, and to further entrench himself within the program he’s turned into a national title contender, says more than his statement ever could.

“I think what’s super important is that President Whitten and I both wanted coach Cig to know how much we’re committed to him, and committed to football,” Dolson told IndyStar on Thursday. “That was really what led to the sense of urgency (around this contract). And then we also didn’t really want any distractions for the team.”

Now, that team pushes forward unfettered, into the back half of a season that by all rights should end in a Big Ten championship game, and then the College Football Playoff.

Realities that seemed like fantasy even two years ago have become commonplace now in Bloomington. They have been met with an enthusiasm that rivals anything this place has shown for hoops in the last 30 years.

This isn’t a basketball school playing football anymore. The conventions have been overturned.

Indiana is a football school now, and on current evidence, that’s not changing any time soon.

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