Top 10 highest paid college football coaches following Curt Cignetti’s new deal

Like Teddy KGB said to Mike McDermott in the final showdown during the movie Rounders: Pay. That. Man. His. Money. Indiana did just that with their highly coveted and highly successful football coach, Curt Cignetti.

The 64-year-old Cignetti looks meaner than a traffic cop before a morning cup of coffee as he storms around the Hoosier sideline, but whatever formula he's dispelled upon the IU program has worked like a charm, netting Cignetti huge raises in each of his first two seasons. This October 2025 extension is absolutely going to hit Indiana in the checkbook.

According to Indiana's own athletic department, Cignetti has inked a new deal worth roughly $11.6 million annually and runs for eight more season, until he's 72 years old and probably ready to run for an Indiana senatorial seat. But that new yearly total places Curt Cignetti, the Indiana football coach, among the top three highest-paid college football coaches in the country.

Check out the whole list below if interested...

Top 10 Coach Salaries in College Football

1. Kirby Smart (Georgia) | 13,003,000
2. Ryan Day (Ohio St.) | 12,500,000
3. Curt Cignetti (Indiana) | 11,600,000
4. Lincoln Riley (USC) | $11,537,560
5. Dabo Swinney (Clemson) | $11,258,575
6. Steve Sarkisian (Texas) | $10,800,000
7. Dan Lanning (Oregon) | $10,400,000
8. Kalen DeBoer (Alabama) | $10,250,000
9. Brian Kelly (LSU) | $10,175,000
10. Bill Belichick (UNC) | $10,100,000

It's not a shock that the only two current head coaches to win multiple national titles — Dabo Swinney with Clemson in the 2010s, and Kirby Smart with Georgia in the early 2020s — are right up there as two of the five highest-paid coaches, with Smart taking No. 1.

Elsewhere, Ryan Day is obvious after he just won the national title and may join Swinney and Smart in the two-fer club as he aims to repeat. Cignetti falls in at third, while we wait on details of his buyout, which will go a long way in determining how scared Hoosier fans should be of the Penn States of the world who might want to poach him away.