5 devastated teams who can no longer poach Curt Cignetti from Indiana this offseason

With the Indiana Hoosiers extending Curt Cignetti, that means arguably the best head-coaching candidate who could have been on the market will no longer be. 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 him a major commitment. He will be making $8 million annually for the next eight years, with an annual $1 million retention bonus baked in. His buyout is pushing $70 million.

This will be one of the most interesting revolutions on the coaching carousel in quite some time. While six Group of Five jobs are open, we cannot reasonably expect for the best job to potentially open up in the Power Four to be Purdue. Someone we least expect will get the ax between now and the end of the month. It is the nature of the beast in the college football coaching profession, people.

So with Cignetti staying at Indiana for the foreseeable future, we have to wonder who this news affected most negatively. For someone to be good at football, that means somebody else has to be bad, as there are only so many games to be played in a season. I would think if Indiana did not get out ahead of this, 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 may end up leaving on his own accord after destroying a program.

5. USC Trojans

I am going to keep saying this until I am blue in the face. Jennifer Cohen did not hire Lincoln Riley. Mike Bohn did, and he no longer calls the shots in the USC Trojans' athletic department. Riley had an excellent five-year run at Oklahoma in Bob Stoops' extended wake. Now in year three at USC, everyone wants him gone outside of the Trojan Family, and even they are starting to turn on him.

While I do not know if Cignetti would have been the ideal fit for USC, he does know how to win everywhere he goes. He was ultra-aggressive in the transfer portal after leaving James Madison for Indiana to help flip the Hoosiers' roster on the fly. He would swiftly eradicate the entitlement (or whatever you want to call it) that has plagued USC for decades. I do not think he is a USC type of hire, but at this point that might be a good thing.

Frankly, it would serve USC well to hire a blue-collar head coach with a lunchpail mentality to get back to winning big. If Riley is let go, or walks to the NFL on his own accord, the first name I would pursue is Matt Campbell at Iowa State. Campbell may be Midwest to the bone, but now in the Big 10 USC needs a head coach who knows how to win games in that part of the country. Campbell sure does, as does Cignetti.

Since USC is not going to want to admit defeat for hiring Riley just yet, this was always a long shot.

4. Oklahoma Sooners

Oklahoma used to be good, so what happened? Well, Riley left the team in a bad spot, focing it to reach on a fantastic coordinator with no head-coaching experience in Brent Venables. Factor in the Sooners leaving the Big 12 for the SEC, and this team is going nowhere fast. OU went from being the best program in its former conference to a forgettable afterthought in its new league. It is so very sad.

Because Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione has been in this role for more than a fifth of the time that Oklahoma has been a state, he's gotten to operate without consequence in dishing out the dumbest extension I have ever seen. When it happened in the moment, everybody was wondering why Castiglione was so willing to stick his neck out for an unproven coach in Venables.

Venables' buyout is a bitter pill to swallow, but had Cignetti been available, he would have taken the Sooners back to greatness in short order. To have OU's resources and football legacy backing him up, Cignetti could have actually contended for national championships at Oklahoma year in and year out. Indiana is vying for one this year, but he would have looked so good rocking the crimson and cream.

The Cignetti extension may work out, but the Venables one is a cautionary tale of what can happen when it does not.

3. Auburn Tigers

I would venture to guess that Auburn will give Hugh Freeze at least one more year to get it right down on The Plains. He has won everywhere else he has coached before, including in the SEC previously at Ole Miss. While you do not need a burner phone to call up Cignetti's representation, I cannot say that he would have taken the Auburn job if offered. He did work at Alabama before, plus, the job is awfully toxic right now.

Freeze's buyout number is not insurmountable, so Auburn could realistically move on from him at any point in time. Again, firing Gus Malzahn, Bryan Harsin and then Freeze over the course of four seasons could do irreparable damage to Auburn's fading national brand. This is the hardest job in the country, which is why Cignetti would have been such a great candidate. He is winning at another difficult place.

Like with Oklahoma, you would have better resources and winning tradition at Auburn over Indiana. While having to play Alabama and Georgia annually makes this job a challenge, Indiana rarely goes to bowl games. This year may be an outlier, or potentially the start of something truly special for the Late Bloomer in Bloomington. I just know that Cignetti would strike fear inside the SEC.

It serves Auburn to be patient and wait one more year to fire Freeze, but Auburn runs on Auburn time!

2. UCF Knights

This past season has not been kind to Gus Malzahn at UCF. While he did have tremendous success as both the head coach and offensive coordinator at Auburn, his one-trick pony offense is no longer cutting it in Orlando. This was a team that at one point this season was the favorite to win the Big 12. Now they are probably not getting to even 6-6.

UCF is the type of job where you can win very quickly because of the rich influx of talent in-state. While playing in a league without any other southeastern state could come back to haunt UCF down the line, you are still in Florida, and football is still a huge deal within this fanbase. It is a job with tough, but fair expectations. I am afraid that Malzahn has not brought the goods UCF was hoping for.

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

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

1. West Virginia Mountaineers

This is the one that stings the most, and the one no one is talking about. Curt Cignetti is an alum of West Virginia University. He played quarterback for the 'Eers in the late 1970s to early 1980s. He hails from Pittsburgh, which is WVU's primary recruiting base. While Clarksburg native Jimbo Fisher may have an inkling to come home, Cignetti is the better coach and he would have made a difference.

Under Neal Brown, WVU is just good enough to get to a bowl game in the new Big 12 and little more. He was an excellent head coach previously at Troy, but so was Jon Sumrall and the iconic Larry Blakeney. (It makes you wonder if Gerad Parker even knows what he is doing down in Alabama, but I digress.) What I am getting at is we could have been seeing a third peak of WVU football under the guidance of one of its very own.

We may never get to see West Virginia be what it was under Rich Rodriguez in the mid-2000s again, but who ever saw this type of football awesomeness seap out of Bloomington, Indiana? This was the job Indiana did not want Cignetti to take. He may have taken it because even if he is in his early-to-mid-60s, it is so incredibly hard to turn down the opportunity to lead one's alma mater.

Wren Baker did not hire Neal Brown, but I doubt he would fire him for Fisher after winning six games.