Indiana football head coach Curt Cignetti was ready when he was asked about the program’s non-conference scheduling strategy at Big Ten Media Days on Tuesday in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The Hoosiers had just recently moved to opt out of a series against Virginia, which spawned a fresh slew of discourse about the program online.
Cignetti noted that the scheduling strategy was in place before he arrived in Bloomington, but he signed off on it after being hired. He then noted the SEC’s non-conference scheduling habits
before claiming Indiana was just following that approach.
He then went on to detail his support for the Big Ten’s proposal for the conference to receive four auto-bids in the College Football Playoff.
Here’s his full answer:
“That was a scheduling philosophy that began before I was hired, but I did sign off on it upon being hired before our first season, okay? Look, here’s the bottom line, okay, we picked up an extra home game, and we play nine conference games. The two best conferences in college football, any football guy that’s objective will tell you is the Big Ten and the SEC, all right? 12 of the 16 SEC teams play three G5 or an FCS game. 12 of those teams play 36 games, 29 G5 games and seven FCS games, and one less conference game. All right? So we figured we would just adopt SEC scheduling philosophy, you know. Some people don’t like it. I’m more focused in on those nine conference games. Not only do we want to play nine conference games, okay, and have the four-four championship — the playoff format, we want to have play-in games to decide who plays in those playoffs. Championship weekend, let’s play three versus six and four versus five. You want to decide that on the field and make sure everybody’s strength of schedule is what it needs to be? Let’s make everybody play nine conference games, and on championship weekend three will play six, four will play five. There’s still room for another at-large in that format. Why shouldn’t the Big Ten have four AQs because Ohio State actually finished fourth in the conference at the end of the season. Indiana and Penn State were tied for second. They won the tie-breaker. Ohio State won the national championship. You want to put the best teams in the playoffs, give the best leagues the AQ, but make them earn it with play-in games. We wouldn’t be opposed to Big Ten-SEC regular season games every year. We need to standardize the schedule across the board if we want to have objective criteria for who should be in the playoffs and who shouldn’t, and we need to take the decision-making off the committee to some degree.”
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