College football fans did not hold back on trolling Indiana football coach Curt Cignetti after his brash and confident pre-game remarks backfired on Friday night.
Ahead of the Hoosiers showdown with Notre Dame in the opening round of the College Football Playoffs, Cignetti appeared on ESPN’s College GameDay with the utmost confidence.
While speaking to Nick Saban, Pat McAfee, and the rest of the panel, Cignetti boldly claimed that his program performed against the best teams in the nation.
‘We don’t just beat top-25 teams, we beat the s*** out of them,’ he told the panel in South Bend, Indiana. He also noted a victory over Coastal Carolina while ranked 22nd nationwide.
Those words backfired after the Fighting Irish dominated them to secure a 27-17 victory to advance to the Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day.
After the embarrassing showing, fans flooded X with ridiculing responses, which made Cignetti’s name a trending topic on the platform.
After a questionable play in the third quarter, a fan wrote, ‘Yet another bonehead play by Curt Cignetti. He calls timeout when the team would have got a stop on 4th down. This guy can’t do anything right today.’
Another user posted a video of Chad ‘Ochocinco’ Johnson crying on the Night Cap podcast and wrote ‘Curt Cignetti offense against ranked teams.’
‘Curt Cignetti talked A LOT of [s***] just to punt down 17 with 10 minutes to play,’ a third wrote in the fourth quarter.
‘It’s one thing for the players to do that, but I’m looking at Cignetti sideways. How can you talk that much, but coach so conservatively? Punting in the 4th Q while down 17,’ a fourth echoed.
‘Curt Cignetti = garbage time merchant,’ wrote a fifth.
A sixth user posted the iconic clip of standup comedian Kat Williams saying ‘you shouldn’t have been talking s***.’
Following his remarks on Friday, Saban told Cignetti ‘One thing you didn’t learn from me is talking all the s*** you talk.”
Cignetti, who played quarterback for West Virginia when Saban was a defensive backs coach for the Mountaineers, was part of Saban’s first coaching staff at Alabama in 2007. Cignetti worked under Saban as a wide receivers coach and recruiting coordinator from 2007-2010.
After getting hired for the Indiana head coaching job, Cignetti immediately made his verbal antics known before leading his team to one of their best seasons in program history.
During a pep rally last year, Cignetti took the mic and said, ‘Purdue sucks… So does Michigan and Ohio State.’
Both sides came into Friday’s game with 11-1 records.
The fifth-ranked Fighting Irish held the No Hoosiers to three points through the first three quarters before Indiana’s desperate attempts got them 14 points in the fourth.
Nonetheless, their efforts came in vain as Notre Dame steamrolled past them to secure a meeting with the Georgia Bulldogs in the next round.
