Official 2025 Conference Championship Weekend thread

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Gophers1992 said:
Sure but do those programs have the resources and rich tradition that Indiana has?
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Would absolutely love to peer into another universe where Cuban doesn't spend a dime on 2025 IU just like he didn't spend a dime on 2024 IU.

No Mendoza.


Who's the QB this year, then?

How many games does IU win?
 












GopherGrit said:
That's must be why Cignetti lost to NDSU all those times with JMU back in FCS.
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To be clear, Cignetti coached at JMU from 2019 through 2023. During those years, JMU was in FCS for the 2019, 2020, and 2021 seasons. They then moved to FBS in the 2022 season.

"All those times with JMU back in FCS" that "Cignetti lost to NDSU" was in fact the 2019 (finals) and 2021 (semifinals) FCS playoffs. If you think two losses in three years to NDSU constitutes "all those times", well, I guess you can continue with your version of JMU football history...
 





GopherGrit said:
Bold: having more talented players than almost every team you play against, will win you games.

That's not some football genius at the helm.
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How much money did you lose betting against IU?? In 2024 the majority of IU transfers were from JMU and non power 5 teams (so, add them to the remnants from a 3-9 IU team). They beat the snot out of every team except OSU and ND. If those players were more talented than all but OSU/ND then it has to be coaching and talent identification. I don’t think it was billionaires pouring money into those transfers last year before Cignetti proved he could turn IU around.

This year he has more resources but guess who has way more tradition and resources? PSU, Michigan, USC, Oregon just in the Big Ten. They couldn’t do what IU did.
 



btowngopher said:
Like I said, close enough. I don’t know why they didn’t rate him even higher when he was rated higher than those ahead of him as an NFL prospect.
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OK, but did they pay the entire defensive two deep huge money as well? Their most recent transfer class was rated 25. The inaugural class was 30th. If they have deep NIL dollars why aren’t they nearer the top? Texas Tech was #2 this year and certainly isn’t a blue blood getting the benefit of the doubt.
 

Pompous Elitist said:
OK, but did they pay the entire defensive two deep huge money as well? Their most recent transfer class was rated 25. The inaugural class was 30th. If they have deep NIL dollars why aren’t they nearer the top? Texas Tech was #2 this year and certainly isn’t a blue blood getting the benefit of the doubt.
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They obviously do well at identifying talent. I don’t know how much they have or how much they paid Mendoza, but he’s obviously a huge get for them. Also having a large NIL budget doesn’t mean you get the best transfer classes every year, you also pay your current players and your high school recruits.
 

btowngopher said:
They obviously do well at identifying talent. I don’t know how much they have or how much they paid Mendoza, but he’s obviously a huge get for them. Also having a large NIL budget doesn’t mean you get the best transfer classes every year, you also pay your current players and your high school recruits.
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Are the two deeps transfers or holdovers, though.
 


Pompous Elitist said:
OK, but did they pay the entire defensive two deep huge money as well? Their most recent transfer class was rated 25. The inaugural class was 30th. If they have deep NIL dollars why aren’t they nearer the top? Texas Tech was #2 this year and certainly isn’t a blue blood getting the benefit of the doubt.
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They have 7 JMU players and 13 P4 transfers on the roster. 80+ are lower transfers or HS players. The guy develops football players.

Beat Illinois, Iowa, penn state, Oregon and tOSU.
 

btowngopher said:
They obviously do well at identifying talent. I don’t know how much they have or how much they paid Mendoza, but he’s obviously a huge get for them. Also having a large NIL budget doesn’t mean you get the best transfer classes every year, you also pay your current players and your high school recruits.
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I mean, that's part of being a coach. On paper, what they have identified in their 2026 class is pretty similar to Minnesota, albeit they have 9 fewer recruits. Their results tell me they do a much better job of developing and coaching up all their players compared to Minnesota.
 

PMWinSTP said:
I mean, that's part of being a coach. On paper, what they have identified in their 2026 class is pretty similar to Minnesota, albeit they have 9 fewer recruits. Their results tell me they do a much better job of developing and coaching up all their players compared to Minnesota.
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I know identifying talent is part of being a coach, I give him props for that. They had two players drafted last year they were both transfers that played one year at Indiana. I think Cignetti has done a great job at constructing a complete roster of players along with a complete roster of assistant coaches.
 

MNVCGUY said:
I just can't believe a team can go 7-5 and somehow be in the conference championship game.....ACC should just stick to basketball.
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If it was Alabama, and they lost in the conference championship game, there would still be people saying they deserve to be in the playoffs.
 


MinneNoVA said:
To be clear, Cignetti coached at JMU from 2019 through 2023. During those years, JMU was in FCS for the 2019, 2020, and 2021 seasons. They then moved to FBS in the 2022 season.

"All those times with JMU back in FCS" that "Cignetti lost to NDSU" was in fact the 2019 (finals) and 2021 (semifinals) FCS playoffs. If you think two losses in three years to NDSU constitutes "all those times", well, I guess you can continue with your version of JMU football history...
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I can only interpret this post to mean that you agree that Cignetti is no coaching genius nor is he some talent evaluation genius.

Otherwise, we would've beaten NDSU when he was coaching JMU at the FCS level.
 

Catechol said:
How much money did you lose betting against IU?? In 2024 the majority of IU transfers were from JMU and non power 5 teams (so, add them to the remnants from a 3-9 IU team). They beat the snot out of every team except OSU and ND. If those players were more talented than all but OSU/ND then it has to be coaching and talent identification. I don’t think it was billionaires pouring money into those transfers last year before Cignetti proved he could turn IU around.

This year he has more resources but guess who has way more tradition and resources? PSU, Michigan, USC, Oregon just in the Big Ten. They couldn’t do what IU did.
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I disagree that their 2024 results were "beat the snot out of every team". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Indiana_Hoosiers_football_team#Schedule

They did have some nice margins of victory against their pathetic non-conf (same thing this year) as well as against the Big Ten teams they played that barely won any conf games. The Mich game was probably similar to their Iowa game this year. Lost the only difficult game they played in the entire regular season.

Your other sentence is bizarre to me. You're saying that all the transfers he brought in were more talented than the players on those 11 teams (except Michigan perhaps), and therefore that's ... coaching? BS! That's the opposite of coaching. That's the only point I'm really making in this thread.


This year, those other teams would have done what IU did .... if they had a billionaire buy them the Heisman winner.
 

So what does/will Cuban get out of this?

Being a sugar daddy? He won't get a single shred of official credit. He had absolutely zero official capacity on the team.

Unlike being an owner of a pro team.


How long can his ego handle that? Once the novelty of this wears off?
 

MaxyJR1 said:
They have 7 JMU players and 13 P4 transfers on the roster. 80+ are lower transfers or HS players. The guy develops football players.

Beat Illinois, Iowa, penn state, Oregon and tOSU.
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Bold: I can't tell if you actually believe this??

Sheer absurdity, to believe that.



Exactly the same as Dabo at Clemson in the mid to late 2010's. They won simply because they had better talent than most of the teams they played, in the weak a$$ ACC. Couple tough games a year. Then they could turn it on when it matters. Trevor Lawrence finished 2nd in Heisman his junior year, then went to NFL.
 

Gophers1992 said:
Nobody is claiming that he has figured out something that nobody knows, but your attempts to downplay what IU has done the last couple years just make you look like a bitter ex-girlfriend.
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Last year I wasn’t sold. They played probably the easiest big ten schedule possible, with a down Michigan team and a loss to Ohio State. This year I have been very impressed.
 

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