David Pollack calls out media hype around Curt Cignetti

David Pollack thinks the media has gotten a little too comfortable crowning Curt Cignetti as some sort of football genius.

The former ESPN analyst weighed in on Cignetti’s media coverage during his See Ball Get Ball with David Pollack podcast ahead of Indiana’s national championship game against Miami on Monday. Pollack clarified he’s a fan of Cignetti and what he’s accomplished in Bloomington, but the breathless coverage has become exhausting.

“Right now, I would say when you’re talking about Cignetti, as much as Marcus Freeman got a lot of pub, there’s no coach getting more pub than Cignetti,” Pollack said. “If Cignetti wrote on a napkin that ‘Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard’. ‘Oh my God, it’s the greatest quote in the history of the world.’ We’d literally would be like ‘Cignetti’s the biggest genius I’v’ve ever seen’. That’s one thing, honestly, because I’m very much a contrarian. I get, really, really tired of certain narratives.”

Pollack’s specific gripe centered on an ESPN article claiming Cignetti personally watches every transfer target, which Pollack found absurdly obvious.

“But, the fact that I saw an ESPN article the other day that was like Cignetti personally watches every transfer, No shiznit, Sherlock,” Pollack continued. “So does every other motherfreaking head coach in college football. Like, they all watch ’em. You don’t think Kirby (Smart) down the road is going ‘Nah, y’all got it… I trust you with my $2.5 million check I’m about to stroke.’ No shiznit. That part bothers me a little bit. I love Cig, and I think he’s been great for the sport. His confidence, his leadership — he’s got all of the right things.”

The criticism comes as Indiana stands one win away from completing a 16-0 season and claiming the program’s first national championship. Cignetti inherited a 3-9 team in 2023 and has gone 26-2 across two seasons in Bloomington, building Indiana into a legitimate power through aggressive use of the transfer portal and an unapologetic approach to demanding respect for his program.

That approach made Cignetti a media darling throughout his first season and much of his second. But Pollack’s point is that the coverage has crossed from celebrating a remarkable turnaround into treating basic coaching responsibilities as revolutionary innovation. Every head coach watches transfer tape. Every head coach tries to motivate players. Every head coach works long hours. Cignetti does it well, but he’s not reinventing the wheel.

“That part bothers me a little bit. I love Cig, and I think he’s been great for the sport,” Pollack said. “His confidence, his leadership. He’s got all of the right things. Here’s the thing, though. Here’s what the media is always going to do: Build, build, build, give me a crack. Give me a crack. I’ll slap that, and I’ll knock you right back down a few pegs. Because that’s exactly what the media does.”

Pollack would know. He spent over a decade at ESPN as a College GameDay analyst before being laid off in 2023, and his career included plenty of experience with how narratives build and collapse. He famously sat next to Nick Saban during the 2023 national championship and declared Georgia had “taken over college football” — a statement Alabama players later cited as bulletin board material when they knocked Georgia out of playoff contention the following season.

Since leaving ESPN, Pollack has focused on his Family Goals Podcast and ventured into culture war territory on social media, repeatedly posting about transgender athletes in women’s sports using a recycled photoshop template. He’s been open about feeling liberated from ESPN’s social media policies, though his post-ESPN career hasn’t translated into major broadcasting opportunities despite the competitive landscape for college football talent.

Cignetti, meanwhile, has learned his own lessons about managing a public persona in an unforgiving media landscape.

This season, Cignetti dialed back the public swagger and focused on coaching, acknowledging on The Joel Klatt Show that he’d been “kind of out there last year, too, publicly” and needed to shift his approach. He also pointed to what he called a “great divide” in college football media, where coverage has fractured along conference and network lines, making it harder for programs like Indiana to get fair treatment from media explicitly tied to other leagues.

Indiana’s 56-22 drubbing of Oregon in the Peach Bowl silenced most skeptics and brought Cignetti’s methods full circle.

Cignetti now has a chance to quiet all of it by winning Monday night. A national championship would cement his place among the sport’s elite and justify every piece of hype he’s received. But until then, Pollack would like the media to stop treating everything Cignetti does like it’s a groundbreaking innovation.