'Purdue sucks:' IU football coach Curt Cignetti explains Purdue comment from last winter

INDIANAPOLIS -- Indiana football coach Curt Cignetti said Thursday he will worry about Purdue and the Old Oaken Bucket when Game 12 rolls around on the schedule.

Shortly after his hire last winter, though, Cignetti directly mentioned the Boilermakers while introducing himself to the crowd at a Hoosiers men's basketball game. He even flipped around a longstanding (though since abandoned) Purdue fan rallying cry.

" I don't plan on taking a back seat to anybody," Cignetti said, before ramping the crowd up even more. "Purdue sucks -- but so does Michigan and Ohio State."

Purdue coach Ryan Walters took note of the comment, once it circulated on social media. He reposted it on X.com with a series of emojis, including ones for a notebook and a receipt.

"I think people liked the tweet I put out right after that,," Walter said earlier this week. "And I think they appreciated that. I've got a bunch of guys who've got a chip on our shoulder for a lot of reasons."

For Cignetti, hired from James Madison to replace Tom Allen after three Big Ten victories in three years, that comment had less to do with putting down IU's rival and more to do with encouraging the fan base to take aim higher.

"When you get to be 62, 63, you lose your filter a little bit, right?" Cignetti said. "And when you’re used to success and you’ve been on campus all day and you detect some things you don’t like, it kind of gets under your skin a little bit.

"We are in the entertainment business. It’s coaching, but it’s entertainment. I remember Jim Tressell, when he went to Ohio State, he said something about beating Michigan. ... I just ramped that up a little bit I guess. You've got 17,000 people in the basketball arena and I’ve got to get them excited.

"The first part was easy, but why stop there and set the bar at 6-6? We're going after these two. We want to be the best."

Cignetti referenced Tressell's January 2001 guarantee, also made during a Buckeyes men's basketball game, that the fans would be proud of the team "most especially in 310 days in Ann Arbor." Michigan had won two straight and 12 of the previous 16 games in that rivalry at the time. Ohio State won The Game that fall -- and 16 of the next 18 after that.

Cignetti could rattle off the pertinent details of the current state of the Purdue-IU rivalry. He knows the Boilermakers have a three-game winning streak. He even knows the last IU victory came in double overtime in 2019.

For both Cignetti and Walters, the path to a higher level success inevitably involves wining that Thanksgiving weekend game.

"In-state rivalries are a great thing," Cignetti said. "Rivalries are a great thing. We want to be so good we’re a lot of people’s rivals. So when we get to (Purdue) week, we’ll concern ourselves with it."

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: 'Purdue sucks:' IU football coach Curt Cignetti explains Purdue comment from last winter