With the Indiana Hoosiers extending Curt Cignetti, this arguably means that the best head coaching candidate that could have been on the market will no longer be on the market. Cignetti had become the talk of the college football world while leading the Hoosiers to a 10-0 record in his first season at the helm, and Indiana felt comfortable enough to make a major commitment to him. He will earn $8 million per year for the next eight years, with an annual retention bonus of $1 million. His buyout reached 70 million dollars.

This will be one of the most interesting revolutions in the coaching carousel in some time. Although six Group of Five jobs are open, we cannot reasonably expect the best potentially open job in the Power Four to be Purdue. Someone least expected will receive the ax by the end of the month. It is the nature of the beast in the college football coaching profession, people.

So with Cignetti remaining at Indiana for the foreseeable future, we have to wonder who this news has affected most negatively. For someone to be good at soccer means someone else must be bad, because there are only so many games to play in a season. I think if Indiana hadn’t gotten ahead of themselves, one of these teams would have done what it took to make him their next head coach.

Let’s start with a head coach who could end up leaving on his own after destroying a program.

I’m going to keep saying this until I’m blue in the face. Jennifer Cohen didn’t hire Lincoln Riley. Mike Bohn did it, and he’s no longer calling the shots in the USC Trojans athletic department. Riley had an excellent five-year run at Oklahoma in the extended wake of Bob Stoops. Now, in year three at USC, everyone wants him out of the Trojan family, and even they are starting to turn on him.

While I don’t know if Cignetti would have been the right fit for USC, he knows how to win wherever he goes. He’s been ultra-aggressive in the transfer portal after leaving James Madison for Indiana to help turn around the Hoosiers’ roster on the fly. He would quickly eradicate the entitlement (or whatever you want to call it) that has plagued USC for decades. I don’t think this is a USC type hire, but at this point it could be a good thing.

Frankly, it would serve USC well to hire a blue-collar head coach with a lunch mentality to start winning big again. If Riley is released or heads towards the NFL On his own, the first name I would look for is Iowa State’s Matt Campbell. Campbell may be Midwestern to the bone, but now in the Big 10, USC needs a head coach who knows how to win games in this part of the country. Campbell certainly does, as does Cignetti.

Considering USC won’t want to admit defeat just yet for hiring Riley, it was always going to be a long shot.

Oklahoma was good, so what happened? Well, Riley left the team in a bad place, forcing them to bring in a fantastic coordinator with no head coaching experience in Brent Venables. Factor in the Sooners’ departure from the Big 12 to the SEC, and this team isn’t going anywhere fast. OU went from being the best program in its old conference to a forgettable afterthought in its new league. It’s so sad.

Because Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione has been in this role for more than a fifth of the time Oklahoma has been a state, he was able to act without consequence in handing out the stupidest extension I have ever view. When it happened at that time, everyone was wondering why Castiglione was so willing to stick his neck out for an unproven manager in Venables.

Venables’ buyout is a bitter pill to swallow, but if Cignetti had been available, he would have led the Sooners back to greatness in short order. To benefit from OU’s resources and football heritage, Cignetti could have contended for national championships at Oklahoma year after year. Indiana is in the running to get one this year, but he would have looked so good wearing the crimson and cream.

The Cignetti extension may work, but Venables’s is a warning of what can happen if it doesn’t.

I would venture a guess that Auburn will give Hugh Freeze at least one more year to succeed on the Plains. He’s won everywhere he’s coached before, including in the SEC previously at Ole Miss. While you don’t need a cell phone to call Cignetti’s representation, I can’t say he would have taken the Auburn job if it had been offered to him. He once worked in Alabama, and what’s more, his job is terribly toxic right now.

Freeze’s buyout number isn’t insurmountable, so Auburn could realistically move on from him at any time. Again, firing Gus Malzahn, Bryan Harsin and then Freeze over the course of four seasons could do irreparable damage to Auburn’s flagging national brand. It’s the toughest job in the country, which is why Cignetti would have been such a good candidate. He wins at another difficult place.

As with Oklahoma, you would have better resources and a winning tradition at Auburn rather than Indiana. Although having to play Alabama and Georgia every year makes that job a challenge, Indiana rarely goes to bowl games. This year could be an exception, or potentially the start of something truly special for Bloomington’s Late Bloomer. I just know Cignetti would be scary in the SEC.

It helps Auburn to be patient and wait another year to trigger Freeze, but Auburn runs on Auburn time!

Last season was not kind to Gus Malzahn at UCF. Although he had tremendous success as head coach and offensive coordinator at Auburn, his one-trick pony offense is no longer enough in Orlando. This was a team that at one point this season was the favorite to win the Big 12. Now they probably don’t even get to 6-6.

UCF is the type of job where you can earn very quickly thanks to the influx of talent in the state. Even though playing in a league without any other southeastern states could come back to haunt UCF down the line, you’re still in Florida and football is still a huge deal within that fan base. It’s a job with tough but fair expectations. I fear Malzahn has not brought the results UCF hoped for.

The other three potential vacancies I listed are sort of going through the same issues: The winning tradition is not currently being fulfilled because of the man in charge of the program. These are all places where you can win, and win fast. Not only does Cignetti win and win quickly, he wins instantly. He would have won the Big 12 in his first year at UCF if he had left IU for Orlando.

It seems increasingly likely that UCF will be looking for a new head coach to lead them next season.

It’s the one that stings the most, and the one that no one talks about. Curt Cignetti is an alumnus of West Virginia University. He played quarterback for the ‘Eers from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. He is a native of Pittsburgh, which is WVU’s primary recruiting base. Although Clarksburg native Jimbo Fisher may feel like he’s coming home, Cignetti is the better coach and he would have made the difference.

Under Neal Brown, WVU is just good enough to make a bowl game in the new Big 12 and then some. He was previously a great head coach at Troy, as was Jon Sumrall and the iconic Larry Blakeney. (One wonders if Gerad Parker even knows what he’s doing at Alabama, but I digress.) What I’m getting at is that we could have seen a third summit of WVU football under the direction of one of his own.

We may never see West Virginia be what it was under Rich Rodriguez in the mid-2000s again, but who has ever seen this type of football awesomeness come out of Bloomington, Indiana? This was the job Indiana didn’t want Cignetti to take on. Perhaps he accepted it because even though he is in his early to mid-60s, it is extremely difficult to turn down the opportunity to lead his alma mater.

Wren Baker didn’t hire Neal Brown, but I doubt he’ll fire him for Fisher after winning six games.