Pagoda

Sadly it was only $9M because of the offset from him taking the Va Tech job. PSU was lucky.

Penn State is hitting their fans with ticket price increases of 250% to nearly 400% for next season. https://www.mcall.com/2026/08/19/penn-state-football-fans-shocked-by-price-increase-for-2027-season-tickets/ Pat Kraft is awful. Thank goodness he isn’t our AD.

Gettin’ closer. This ep is especially good.

Looking back, I'm happy during the portal for the '25 team I had no idea what our roster budget really was. I don't know how Cig did what he did with a roster budget around half of the big boys he ended up beating. It's got to be the most amazing accomplishment in modern sports. Leicester winning the Premier League is close too be fair -- similar deal with a tiny squad budget and doing it over a whole long season. Now we're top third in the conference in terms of resources. That should make things easier for the staff...

Right. And that has helped us schedule some pretty interesting postseason games that dwarf anything possible in the non-con. Cig knows best. I’m supporting Cig’s preference.

This track is oddly entertaining. They need to add some width to that hairpin for next year. These cars don’t have the turning radius for the inside line… so they always drift up and hit the cars taking a wider line.

IMO the polls and committee don’t incentivize big time non-cons enough. The upside/downside is not too appealing. Also the final committee ranking is still mainly correlated with record. The correlation of rank and record was 0.7 last season which is obviously quite strong. I’d like a better non-con too, but I’m fine supporting Cig’s philosophy that preps us for later in the season. I think he will evolve as needed.

BTN visit to fall camp is now on YouTube

A note from an astute friend of the program.

Yea, it’s hard to spend that much when the stadium is only used 7 or 8 times per year. ROI isn’t good. I doubt any events could be stolen from Lucas Oil up the road. And the North and South endzones were recently built and contain all sorts of nice offices and facilities with lots of lifespan left. New P4 college stadiums aside from Minny I can think of: Baylor (meh) and Kansas is basically a new stadium. Pretty rare.

I think the "larger investments" refers to other projects at IU, not Memorial. Missing in this tweet is $50M was approved for maintenance. Then on top of that a $150M capital project was approved and for that money the state has to sign off. I assume they will... IUFB is pretty popular right now. With that high level of maintenance spend, I think they're going to keep the current East and West stand structures. As in this won't be a total rebuild of those stands, just making them nicer. $150M is enough for a new press box and suites. How many seats they add while doing this... who knows.

Haha. He’s got some Spurrier in him. I didn’t want to cancel that series but whatever I’m not gonna overthink it I’m just gonna back Cig.

Good news: money has been allocated for Memorial Stadium renovations.

Dave Revsine is on a tweet storm about this. Sorry for the giant post, but comments and clips he posted are good.

Nice.

Louisville is running a huge athletic dept deficit. I don’t see how they grow their way out of this problem. I wonder how much longer they can pump money into bball… a sport which they probably don’t even make money on anymore given the explosion in roster cost. We’ll see. https://www.wdrb.com/sports/crawford-heird-lays-out-louisville-athletics-30-million-problem-to-trustees/article_590a975c-8f0c-4dcd-a196-a2c05478104a.html

Hmm… I think the SEC needs the other conferences, notably the B1G, for compelling games and narrative. On its own it’s worth much less. I doubt we see another Saban like run because of the NIL era. Can’t stack super teams anymore, which is going to spread out the titles. As for what Cig does… I don’t know. Our on paper talent keeps leveling up… so it could be darn good…

That would be amazing. Frankly, if they just don’t win it all this year that would be excellent. Our 16-0 title really annoys them and I’d love to keep lording that over them.

I like the optimism but ND is a 20.5 point favorite. Maybe Wisky surprises them… but it’s gonna be a tough one for them.

I get our “unknowns” and think those are mostly fair. I think our “unknowns” get a little more scrutiny than other teams’ “unknowns.” But whatever. I think our starting point is fine. We’ll find out when the games are played. Plus it gives us a little bit of something to prove again.

In the presser today they asked Cig if he had any comments on what Tommy said. ”Not really.” I’m not too surprised. Nothing needs to be said.

Wow that was awesome! One of the best Cig videos yet. So much better than the generic Q&A.

That’s awesome go Kahlil!

This story really went mainstream on Friday. What a nightmare for Purdue. - Dan Patrick picked this story up and did a segment laughing at Purdue - Stephen A picked this up and did a rant. lol https://youtu.be/4djNzUG6Wik?si=qgrjOI30-eXkazOw - ESPN's morning shows did a segment - Rich Eisen did a segment - And all sorts of smaller media outlets talked about it - As noted above by AZ, their AD had to go on McAfee to do damage control. Think about that -- damage control for an AD's intro press conference. Haha. Just a chef's kiss from Purdue -- they can't help but try to puff their chests out when they should be focused on themselves and improving. It's pretty cool IU fans didn't even have to respond -- everyone else did it for us.

It I were a PU fan (shudder) I’d rather have 10 straight bucket losses than my rival hiring Cig and somehow winning the CFB Natty in dominant fashion and garnering massive national attention.