Curt Cignetti Still Bitter About Indiana Problem Which Rival Big Ten Programs Don't Face

Indiana’s 22-game winning streak is over, but Curt Cignetti has another problem on his mind, and it’s had nothing to do with the loss to Ohio State. Against the Buckeyes, the Hoosiers walked to a reception that the head coach didn’t get to see at the start of the campaign.

“It was electric…I couldn’t be more proud,” Cignetti said about the crowd in Week 7. “We were getting ready to go out the tunnel, I looked at Blake Jackson, our director of football ops, and I said, ‘Compare this to our first game.”

The Hoosiers have completely sold out for the 2026 season. Officially, the reported attendance didn’t show anything odd. 54,493 people attended the season opener against North Texas. 54,376 showed up for Howard, and the Western Kentucky game had an attendance of 54,695.

However, rather than the official attendance, Cignetti was bothered by how the stadium looked during the second halves of these non-conference matchups.

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“What are we, 29-2?” Cignetti said after complaints about the margin and the empty seats at halftime, according to Steven Kubitza of Heavy.com. “When I came, I saw the pictures: 10,000 people in the stands. Don’t [expletive] about a 38-0 win.”

It wasn’t like Cignetti didn’t understand the context. Indiana played its first three games in the afternoon. By the second half, most of these games were blowouts, giving fans very little to stay for the entirety in extreme heat. The head coach was more worried about reception against Big Ten opponents. The home crowd has been a factor in Indiana’s success under Cignetti. That explained the long winning streak.

In Week 8, the Hoosiers are traveling to Ann Arbor to play in a stadium with almost double the capacity of Indiana’s. On his weekly radio show, the Hoosiers coach compared the crowd at Memorial Stadium with the total attendance he saw across six seasons at Indiana University.

“Indiana football coach Curt Cignetti on playing at Michigan Stadium during his radio show: “107,000 to 112,000 right? That’s about our total attendance my six years at IUP,” per X post by Michael Niziolek, Indiana University athletics beat writer for The Herald-Times.

Cignetti has coached at Indiana University, Pennsylvania, from 2011 to 2016 in a stadium that held about 5,200. Ohio State matchup put more people in one Saturday than he saw at home in six years there.

According to the school, the announced crowd this fall was around 54,500 for the Ohio State game and for every home game before it. In 2025, with the team on its way to a national title, home crowds ran from 43,801 to 56,088. Before Cignetti, Indiana had sold out eight games from 2000 through 2024, and most of those came because the other team’s fans traveled.

Cignetti knows what a big crowd looks like. Indiana played in front of 105,751 at Ohio Stadium in November 2024 and 105,231 at Beaver Stadium last season. Those are road games, so none of that was Indiana’s crowd. The biggest home game of the Cignetti era came on October 17 against Ohio State, and he was proud of what he saw.

The Hoosiers are currently 6-1 and the playoff picture isn’t wrecked. Cignetti says every goal is still attainable except going undefeated. What he wants from his program now is a better run game, better offense, and fewer mistakes in the last stretch of the season.

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