True Grit said:
Roster construction and retention is the way. Some have figured it out... BU in football and basketball, not so much.
up to this season, Baylor had a fantastic retention record. Baylor's has actually had some coveted players these last several seasons, and until 2025 we had kept all of them: Bett was the first true painful transfer loss...now we've lost studs Thomas and Price, along with a handful of solid players like DK Kalu.
"some have figured it out" You can only keep the majority of a roster together if they're not highly coveted players or you have a truly massive budget (and even the bluest of bloods lose a few players they'd have preferred to keep).
Indiana needed both scenarios to create this magical season: Cignetti was able to keep the quality core of his JMU squad together at IU because that first year they weren't coveted NIL prizes, and the second year he got Mark Cuban & Larry Ellison money to keep the band together once the rest of the CFB world realized how good those players were...that's not a model he can magically replicate, because now the market is going to price his players very differently. Unless, of course, Cuban and Ellison just start dropping mountains of cash on the program, then they'll sail on in dynasty mode if he can keep team chemistry cooking properly.
AFAIK this is the list of coaches who have a chance to mirror the Cignetti Model* over the next two seasons:
- Eric Morris - UNT to Okie Lite
- Jon Sumrall - Tulane to the UF
- Matt Campbell - ISU to PSU
- James Franklin - PSU to VT
I don't include Lane Kiffin on that list because I don't think enough Ole Miss players are coming to LSU for it to count as the Cignetti Model.
___
*this could be the Chadwell model as he sort of did it first going from CCU to LU, but doing it at that level isn't the same as going from G5 to B1G.