Go back to this time a year ago, mid-October 2024. Penn State football was off to a promising start under 11th-year coach James Franklin, 6-0 after a thrilling victory at USC. Who's to say at that moment, but it looked as if the Nittany Lions might finally - mercifully - be in position to reach the College Football Playoff, which has been bumped from four to 12 teams. What a time in State College.
At that exact same point, Indiana ran its record to 6-0, too. Indiana? The Hoosiers had beaten the Marylands and Northwesterns of the world under first-year coach Curt Cignetti. Cute story. Indiana had played 125 seasons of football before that. It had never won 10 games. What could change?
We rise now, entering the eighth full weekend of the 2025 college football season, staring at a completely altered reality. Franklin indeed coached those Nittany Lions to the CFP. A month ago, his team was ranked second in the nation. This week, he is out of a job, due to cash $49 million in buyout checks.
Cignetti is now the most intriguing character in the sport - not only poised with another 6-0 Indiana team going into Saturday's home game against Michigan State, headed for a (get this) second straight CFP appearance, but also armed with a fresh contract that will pay him (gulp) about $11.6 million annually.
Let's update some numbers. Schools who pay their football coaches the most in average annual salary, according to USA Today's database:
This insane sport has never been an incubator for patience. Its new environment almost prohibits it. Franklin's ouster after 11-plus seasons - in which he won at least 10 games six times - is just the latest hammer to drive that point home. His buyout offers 49 million more pieces of evidence. Cignetti's spanking-new contract - reported Thursday, as his No. 3 Hoosiers look at a slate in which they'll be favored in every remaining regular season game - puts a further bow on the package. It works for players or coaches. Get your guy. Pay him now. Otherwise, he's off.
Look across the country. Franklin has company in Mike Gundy, fired at Oklahoma State, his alma mater, after a 1-2 start in his 21st season. His brethren DeShaun Foster lasted only a year and three games at his alma mater, UCLA. It's not even Halloween. The list of openings is already more than half a dozen long. And the pitchforks are out in Gainesville, Florida; and Auburn, Alabama; and Madison, Wisconsin, to name a few.
That doesn't mean some of these firings aren't - or won't be - justified. It just means that college fan bases and athletic directors are engaged in that time-honored tradition of collectively drumming their fingers. The current environment - a second season with an expanded playoff of 12 teams - makes a real postseason run seem more attainable. Shoot, if the first version of the 12-team playoff included SMU, Arizona State, Boise State and Indiana, couldn't anyone have a chance?
Which gets us back to Cignetti. It's hard to overstate Indiana's previous position as a Big Ten bottom-feeder. In the three seasons before Cignetti's arrival from James Madison - where he went 52-9, even though the final two of his five seasons were the Dukes' initial foray at the FBS level - the Hoosiers went 3-24 in conference games. In its history, Indiana had won nine games in a season twice - most recently in 1967. Predicting he would go, say, 8-4 in his first year would have seemed outlandish.
And in year one, Cignetti got the Hoosiers to 8-1 in the league and into the playoff, finishing 11-2 overall. Now he's opened his second season with those six straight wins - including a thorough 30-20 undressing of then-No. 3 Oregon - to lift the Hoosiers to third in the Associated Press poll. Times the Hoosiers have been ranked as high: zero.
That brings us to the crux of another shift in the dynamics around the sport: the definition of a successful season. Yes, Indiana's unprecedented 2024 ended in a borderline noncompetitive loss to Notre Dame in the first round of the playoff. Clunker of a finale, sure. But there's no way that isn't an absolute bonanza of a campaign.
The reality, though, is that had Cignetti's instant transformation of the Hoosiers come a year earlier, there would have been no CFP appearance. Indiana was edged out for a spot in the Big Ten championship game by none other than James Franklin and Penn State. (Reminder: In January, the Nittany Lions held a 24-17 lead over Notre Dame with five minutes remaining in a national semifinal. Franklin was a better decision by Drew Allar away from playing for the national title. Instead, his quarterback threw an egregious interception, the Nittany Lions lost, and one three-game losing streak later, he's out of a job.)
Anyway ... the Hoosiers finished eighth in the final 2024 CFP standings. In the old four-team playoff, they wouldn't have even been on the bubble. They would have gone to a frivolous-but-fun bowl game, earned their fans the right to spend thousands of dollars on a trip to some sunny locale, and maybe even won the darn thing. That's what memories used to be made of.
The current playoff inarguably offers more opportunities. But it also alters what aspirant programs might believe is realistic. The four-team playoff seemed walled-off, reserved for Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson and some annual wild card. At least one of those three appeared in each version, and in all, they accounted for 19 of the 40 spots during the decade of that format. There were plenty of paths for upstarts to fall short of the playoff and console themselves by winning a bowl game. Save for the odd appearance by Cincinnati or TCU, there was scant hope.
Now, though, the pressure to reach a larger bracket is real. In Franklin's case, once wasn't enough to keep his job. In Cignetti's case, even the whiff of a run to a second straight berth not only got him an insane new deal. It has to cause rival schools to wonder "Why not us?"
James Franklin's previous three seasons yielded 13, 10 and 11 victories. He lost three straight games, and is now being paid $49 million not to coach. Curt Cignetti is 19 games into his career at Indiana, and will be paid more than $11 million annually to coach what had been a sleepy program into a brave new world. You can draw a direct line between Franklin's firing and Cignetti's raise.
In college football, the antennas are always up. The sport's most treasured tradition isn't a tailgate dish or a spirited fight song. It's cultivating impatience, which is almost certainly coming to a school near you.