Mark Cuban donations key in Indiana football national championship run -

Updated Jan. 19, 2026, 12:22 p.m. ET

Among those donning cream and crimson at tonight’s College Football Playoff national championship game will be notable Indiana alum Mark Cuban.

The Dallas Mavericks minority owner has played a key role in helping Curt Cignetti and the Hoosiers build this roster through donations and NIL fundraising. Cuban and Cignetti both hail from Western Pennsylvania and were even born in the same hospital. That connection has bonded the two as Indiana reaches football heights never seen in Bloomington.

“I never thought,” Cuban said on Monday’s ‘First Take’ of seeing IU in a national title game. “The highlight when I was at IU was going to the Holiday Bowl with coach (Lee) Corso, right? No, never in my wildest dreams. We barely even went to football games, let alone thought we might succeed.”

Cuban was on the sidelines for IU’s Peach Bowl win over Oregon, and told Front Office Sports he had made another donation to Indiana’s athletic department during the Hoosiers’ CFP run.

“It wasn’t about designing a program that just went and outbid everybody, it was putting together a program and an organization and a culture,” Cuban said Monday. “All the things you need to do to win, no matter what the sport is.”

Cuban, who played rugby at Indiana, hadn’t been a major benefactor for IU football prior to Cignetti’s hire. So what changed?

“It wasn’t any one thing, it was just who he was,” Cuban said about what attracted him to Cignetti. “He didn’t come in and say, ‘Oh, I’m going to do all these grand things.’ He’s just, ‘This is how we do it. I have a specific way, it’s always worked. There’s no reason why it’s not going to work again.’ I’m like investing in an entrepreneur in ‘Shark Tank’. He’d been there and done that, he had an approach. He has a system. The way he designs everything, the way he builds organizations. That’s really what connected me.”

Indiana and Cignetti have used the transfer portal to rebuild the Hoosiers roster and build a roster capable of competing for a national championship. A key part of the portal is how programs spend the player-revenue sharing from the House vs. NCAA settlement, in addition to NIL.

“I saw it with the Mavs in the NBA, there’s kind of like a salary cap. You have to know how to build a team,” Cuban said. “You have to know what kind of players to go after. It’s not about winning the portal. It’s about getting athletes and players who want to, know their role, work to fill that role, know what their position is with the team, and having an organization and coaches that understand you’re not getting players who are coming in for four years to develop, then they’re great when their seniors. You’re coming in, like coach says: ‘I want production, not potential.’ And understanding that is big.

“And then the other thing I love about the program. They talk about no five stars, limited four stars. What that means to me, they’re not out there trying to outbid everybody. We’re not talking about, ‘We got the most expensive quarterback, and we outbid everybody else.’ Not at all. To me, when a program does that, that’s a desperate program. Putting together the exact right player. When you hear about Fernando (Mendoza) talking about his conversation with CigGPT as I like to call him, about what it takes to win the Heisman, Cig was very clear: It takes a team to win the Heisman. If you don’t have the right players around you, if you don’t have the right people knowing their roles around you, you aren’t going to win the Heisman. And to me that says it all. Successful teams in the NBA, and across all sports, they have a culture, they have a system, they have coaches and administrators who know how to put those pieces together, but you get athletes that you can fit into those roles. That’s what we’ve done better than anybody.”

National championship TV channel on today

The CFP championship game between Indiana and Miami will air nationally on ESPN, with Chris Fowler (play-by-play) and Kirk Herbstreit (analyst) calling the game and Holly Rowe and Molly McGrath serving as sideline reporters.

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