Curt Cignetti debunks Miami’s claim Donald Trump altered national championship

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The Indiana Hoosiers beat the Miami Hurricanes in the College Football Playoff National Championship Game way back in January. The 27-21 victory came down to the wire and was a fitting ending to a historic 16-0 season for the Hoosiers, who had never even won 10 games before head coach Curt Cignetti showed up in Bloomington.

The game was settled on the field, without a question. Or so we thought. This week, the result has come under some scrutiny thanks to comments from Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian.

With President Donald Trump planning to attend this Saturday’s game between the Texas Longhorns and Tennessee Volunteers, Sarkisian claimed that Trump actually altered Miami’s final drive in the championship game.

In an interview with the Longhorn Network, Sarkisian revealed that when Trump is moving around inside the stadium, teams lose the ability to communicate. Sarkisian told host Bobby Burton of “On Texas Football” that Miami coach Mario Cristobal is one of his good friends, and he said that Miami lost communications during “that drive at the end of the game.”

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There is a dispute about which drive Miam was affected by lost communications, but it didn’t matter. The Hoosiers were suddenly dealing with an asterisk.

Or at least they were until Cignetti got in front of a microphone. He did his own interview on Thursday and completely debunked any claim that the loss of communications affected Miami at all.

Curt Cignetti responds to Miami

Indiana coach Curt Cignetti sets the record straight on the communication headset brief shutdown in the national title game. #iufbpic.twitter.com/AC56YRrY8g

— Jeff Rabjohns (@JeffRabjohns) September 25, 2026

“OK, so there’s something spreading like wildfire on social media, right?” Cignetti asked fans,per peegs.com publisher Jeff Rabjohns on X. “That when the president leaves the communications devices go out. The headsets. I mean, that’s a fact. That happens. And when President Trump left the game around the seven-minute mark of the fourth quarter there were two or three plays, we were on defense, we couldn’t hear at all. And the second play was when they gave the ball to Toney, pitched it to him on the fly sweep for the touchdown with 6:37 to go. Well, what’s floating around on social media is, right, that the communication device went down on Miami’s last drive of the game on offense. Oh really? Yeah, so I had to dispel that.”

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Cignetti also added, “these are just facts” and “we’ve got a bunch of BS is what we’ve got.”

Talk about a complete and utter destruction of a conspiracy theory. This barely had a full day before Cignetti went out of his way to completely shut it down.

Indiana plays Northwestern on Saturday night with a chance to move to 4-0. It would be the program’s 20th consecutive win. The Hoosiers have not lost a game in the Big Ten since Ohio State beat them in November 2024. And if you have any questions about any of that, just ask Cignetti.

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