Curt Cignetti denies report he's pushing for Vanderbilt's Mark Byington to be Indiana coach

Yahoo

15-02-2025

Mark Byington has been a revelation in his first year as Vanderbilt's men's basketball coach, inheriting a Commodores program that won nine games last season and guiding it to a 17-7 record and a likely spot in the NCAA Tournament heading into its game Saturday at Tennessee.
With that success, naturally, has come outside interest and speculation.
Byington's name has appeared on several lists of potential candidates at Indiana, which will look to replace coach Mike Woodson when he steps down at the end of the 2024-25 season. That chatter intensified Saturday, when college basketball reporter Adam Zagoria wrote in a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, that Byington is 'a name to keep in mind' at Indiana and that Hoosiers football coach Curt Cignetti is 'pushing for him.'
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One of the figures at the center of the report denies the veracity of at least one aspect of it. Cignetti, who coached at James Madison at the same time as Byington, responded to Zagoria's post to say it was 'not true.'
'(Indiana athletic director) Scott Dolson knows alot (sic) more about basketball than I do,' Cignetti wrote. 'I have my own team to focus on.'
Byington coached four seasons at James Madison from 2020-24, overlapping almost entirely with Cignetti's five-year tenure at the Virginia school. He went 82-36 during that time, culminating with a 32-4 record and a run to the second round in the program's first NCAA Tournament appearance in 11 years. Shortly after his team was eliminated, Byington was hired at Vanderbilt.
In his first season in Nashville, Byington has emerged as one of a handful of strong candidates for national coach of the year honors. After rebuilding the Commodores' roster in the offseason, primarily through the transfer portal, he has Vanderbilt as a projected NCAA Tournament team, one that has notched high-profile victories against the likes of Kentucky and Tennessee. Heading into the weekend, he had the Commodores three victories shy of just their second 20-win season since the 2015-16 season.
Though he's just one year into his time at Indiana, Cignetti could have notable influence at the school after leading the historically woeful Hoosiers to the College Football Playoff.
Indiana, barring a change at North Carolina, is likely to have the most attractive coaching vacancy this season. The Hoosiers have won five national championships and are among the top 10 schools in the country in basketball spending, though they've largely struggled this century, having advanced past the first week of the NCAA Tournament only three times since 2003 (and never gotten past the Sweet 16).
Byington's a Virginia native who has never coached farther north than his home state.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Curt Cignetti denies he's pushing for Mark Byington to be Indiana coach