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A lot of college football coaches have a reputation for being fairly idiosyncratic individuals with unique quirks that shed some light on the kind of mindset required to do that job. There isn’t anyone who’s currently doing it better than Curt Cignetti, who is a creature of habit who relies on Chipotle to the point where a member of his supporting staff could have gotten a free meal every day for over a month due to the number of awards points they accrued with his help.
College football has boasted plenty of interesting characters on the coaching front over the decades. For example, Mike Leach had an impressive ability to make a midweek media session into must-watch content due to his uncanny ability to go on hilarious tangents, and Jim Harbaugh became an almost mythical figure due to the number of bizarre anecdotes he was responsible for during his time at Michigan.
At the risk of trotting out a fairly tired page, guys who are able to ascend to that position tend to be “built different” and wired in a way that makes them have a borderline compulsive obsession with football to the point where normal facets of day-to-day life end up being viewed as a distraction.
Curt Cignetti has been responsible for the most impressive turnaround in college football history since arriving at Indiana in 2024, and his go-to lunch order proves he’s definitely not an exception to that general rule.
One of Curt Cignetti’s assistants at Indiana ended up with a laughable amount of rewards points at Chipotle thanks to the coach’s eating habits
Cignetti is the textbook definition of a no-nonsense coach to the point where he recently had to confirm he has the ability to feel happiness due to his impressive inability to exhibit any sort of joy on the sidelines even when things are going his way.
According to the Wall Street Journal, he is also not the kind of guy who is going to waste valuable seconds of his day deciding what he wants for lunch, as he has ordered the same thing more than 500 times since arriving in Bloomington: a Chipotle burrito bowl with rice, beans, chicken, and a side of guacamole that clocks in at 750 calories and costs $10.90.
Jake McDonald, who serves as the assistant director of football operations at Indiana, is the man tasked with picking up that order, and he told the outlet there was a point where he was sitting on 64,000 reward points in his account.
An entree will currently set you back 1,625 points, which means McDonald could have gotten almost 40 of them for free. Unfortunately, he didn’t know they expired after a year, and as things currently stand, he “only” has 18,529 at his disposal (which is still good enough for 11 meals on the house).