"They Could Barely Live": Curt Cignetti Opens Up About Painful Struggles His Indiana Coaching Staff Went Through

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It has been over five months since the Indiana Hoosiers and Curt Cignetti lifted the national championship; however, they still have the core of their coaching staff with them. This is far from the reality in college football, where many of them would have been plucked by other CFB giants or NFL teams. But for Cignetti, his coaches are more than just assistants; they were people he picked from the very bottom to a better place in Bloomington.

“First of all, I give credit to Pam Whitman, Scott Dolson, our athletic director, and our president, for making that possible,” Cignetti said on Adam Breneman’s YouTube channel. “But when you look at Brian Haines and Mike Shanahan, for instance, because they’ve been with me the longest. Those are two guys that when I hired them, were making under $10,000; they could barely live. And now, they are where they are. So, they’ve been on this ride from the beginning. In their mind, they’re thinking, ‘why get off? What’s better?’ Unless you have got a burning desire to be a head coach right now. So, you know, we’re going to do another rodeo together.”

According to the program’s official website, the number of Indiana’s coaching staff has doubled from 12 in 2025 to 24 in 2026, with just three departures. Winning the national championship with a top coaching staff is one thing; retaining a chunk of them is another. And Cignetti and the Hoosiers have gotten both right.

Just like how he developed a winning formula in the transfer portal by bringing in cheap, experienced players from other programs and building his team around them, Cignetti has also developed a formula for retaining his coaches. It is the kind of advice wealthy young men get when they attain marriageable age: to stay with their longtime partners, and ignore the new ones coming for the glamour. Cignetti has done just this with most of his coaches, especially Brian Haines and Mike Shanahan.

Cignetti hired Haines 12 seasons ago to join him at Indiana University of Pennsylvania as the defensive line coach. Shanahan joined Cignetti two seasons later (2016) as the wide receivers coach of the same program. Before Cignetti gave them these opportunities, Haines was a graduate assistant at Ohio State, while Shanahan was just an offensive graduate assistant at the University of Pittsburgh. And ever since, Cignetti has not coached a football game without having both men by his side.

Running backs coach John Miller first joined Cignetti six seasons ago at JMU as a graduate assistant, before a brief stint as the quality control coach of the Texas Longhorns. He soon returned to Cignetti at JMU and has remained with him ever since. Similarly, special teams coordinator and tight end coach Grant Cain joined him eight seasons ago at JMU.

From the low-paying jobs Cignetti picked most of them from, a bunch of them now earn millions of dollars annually. Generally, Cignetti’s assistants have a salary pool of $10.4 million. Haines is now the highest-paid assistant with a $3 million annual salary, while Shanahan earns $1.7 million. And Miller, who was just a graduate assistant a few years ago, now earns $525,000 as the least-paid assistant, per Yahoo Sports.

Defensive backs coach Ola Adams, cornerbacks coach Rod Ojong and defensive ends coach Budha Williams are more or less the only exceptions here, as their first work with Cignetti was at Bloomington. However, these three have been retained as well, and this is where the works of the program’s president and the athletic director come in. From a salary pool of $5.9 million when Cignetti took over, they have almost doubled the pay of the assistants in 2026 for a job well done.

Cignetti’s assistants who left Bloomington

Barring the exit of very few assistant coaches, the Hoosiers will enter the 2026 season with their national championship-winning staff. Of the 12 coaches on the program’s website in 2025, only three of them left.

Chandler Whitmer, former co-offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach, left to join the Tampa Bay Buccaneers just weeks after winning the championship. Derek Owings, who is perceived as the nation’s best strength and conditioning coach, left just hours after the win to join the Tennessee Volunteers. And defensive quality control coach Cam Haney also joined Tulsa University as their cornerbacks coach.

To prove the truth in this conclusion, two of the coaches who left were coaches who joined Cignetti for the 2025 season. And once the championship came, they left immediately. The lesson in Cignetti’s model is to value long-term relationships over short-term connections. Cignetti seems to be a textbook of winning formulas off the field in college football. He has a working system of maximizing the potential of players and coaches while minimizing the costs involved.

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