Curt Cignetti says he wants Indiana to play Notre Dame … on certain conditions

Nobody takes shots quite like Curt Cignetti. And nobody cancels Power 4 nonconference games quite like him either.

The Indiana football coach did the latter earlier this year when the Hoosiers asked out of a two-game series against Notre Dame. But he told the Big Ten Network he would be happy to put the Fighting Irish back on the schedule — on certain conditions.

“They ought to come to our place twice, and we’ll go up there once, since they’re not in a conference,” Cignetti said in an interview on the network that aired Friday.

“I’d love to play them. It’d be a great in-state game.”

Curt Cignetti on Notre Dame and future non-conference schedules pic.twitter.com/f6V9F02OIz

— Big Ten Network (@BigTenNetwork) August 15, 2026

Indiana has faced Notre Dame once during Cignetti’s tenure: a 27-17 Fighting Irish win in South Bend in the opening round of the 2024-25 College Football Playoff. The Irish hold a 24-5-1 edge over the Hoosiers in their series history, with the most recent regular-season meeting coming in 1991.

“I’d love to play ’em,” Cignetti said of Notre Dame. “It would be a great in-state game. I guess there is a backstory to that. I don’t quite know what it is, so it is what it is, and the Big Ten schedule is pretty darn tough, too.”

The Hoosiers went 17-1 in the Big Ten regular-season schedule over Cignetti’s first two seasons, but they have yet to play a regular-season nonconference game against a Power 4 opponent during that period.

In fact, the program has made headlines for backing out of nonconference games against Power 4 schools in recent years, including dropping home-and-home series against both Louisville (2024 and ’25) and Virginia (2027 and ’28).

After Notre Dame dropped the defending national champs from its schedule in 2030 and 2031 and replaced them with USC, Cignetti’s squad was left without any games against Power 4 programs on its future nonconference schedules. Indiana hosts North Texas (Sun Belt), Howard (FCS) and Western Kentucky (Conference USA) over the first three weeks of this upcoming season.

Asked about Indiana’s nonconference scheduling decisions before the 2025 season, Cignetti responded, “That was a scheduling philosophy that began before I was hired, but I did sign off on it upon being hired before our first season, OK?”

Cignetti later added, “We figured we would just adopt an SEC scheduling philosophy.”

The trademark zinger was a reference to SEC teams playing eight-game conference schedules that also required them to play just one Power 4 nonconference game each season. Now that the conference has added a ninth conference game to match the Big Ten, however, each SEC team will play at least 10 Power 4 opponents this fall — one more than Cignetti’s Hoosiers will.