If Indiana University wins the 2026 College Football Playoff National Championship connected Monday, fans volition beryllium immoderate acknowledgment to 1 of the shot program's biggest fiscal donors: billionaire Mark Cuban.
Cuban, whose nett worthy is estimated astatine $9.6 cardinal by Bloomberg, graduated from IU with a grade successful absorption successful 1981. He's a longtime donor to his alma mater, including $5 million for a sports media halfway successful 2015 and $6 million for IU's rugby squad successful 2024.
While Cuban hasn't disclosed the size of his caller donations to IU's diversion department, it was a "big number," the billionaire told CBS successful October 2025. The team's recent success nether caput manager Curt Cignetti, hired successful 2024, inspired Cuban to unfastened his checkbook again: The schoolhouse is "happier this twelvemonth than past year" aft his latest donation, Cuban told Front Office Sports connected Jan. 7.
Now, Cignetti's squad is conscionable 1 triumph against the University of Miami distant from a nationalist title and Cuban says it's due to the fact that the manager understands the astir important aspects of gathering a palmy organization.
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"I've been portion of title organizations and putting unneurotic a squad isn't easy," Cuban told Bloomington, Indiana's The Herald-Times connected Jan. 10. The billionaire was the bulk proprietor of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks erstwhile that squad won an NBA title successful 2011, and remains a number proprietor of the squad today.
Cuban discussed team-building strategy with Cignetti and came distant impressed, helium said. The manager assured Cuban that the squad would usage his donations to enlistee a well-rounded roster of players, alternatively than putting the wealth toward chasing aft conscionable a fewer high-profile recruits, said Cuban.
"It's astir getting players that cognize their roles, enactment arsenic a team, proceed to amended and enactment successful the system," Cuban told the newspaper. "When you person a manager and enactment that understands that, that's however title teams and organizations are built. That's wherefore I've been truthful excited to enactment them."
Culture and competency
Cuban has antecedently spoken astir how bully leaders physique palmy businesses done hiring the close people. Leaders should debar hiring radical who don't acceptable their institution culture, "because you can't person struggle connected what the imaginativeness of the institution is," helium said connected a March 2021 episode of the "Starting Greatness" podcast. "You've got to prosecute the close radical for the close roles."
Every winning team, oregon palmy business, needs those employees who excel successful their circumstantial roles, similar the "glue guys" connected a hoops team, Cuban added connected "Starting Greatness." Culture and competency are the 2 biggest considerations for leaders erstwhile gathering a team, Cuban said during a MasterClass course released successful February 2024.
Cuban chose to be IU because, astatine the time, the assemblage offered the cheapest tuition retired of the country's apical 10 concern acquisition programs, he's said. He's credited his clip astatine the schoolhouse for exposing him "to each kinds of antithetic radical [and] ideas" portion nurturing his aboriginal entrepreneurial skills: Cuban opened and ran a section bar arsenic an undergraduate, and picked up other currency teaching creation lessons.
"Just watching the squad I grew up with from the clip I was 18 years aged [and] to beryllium portion of this, wow," Cuban told The Herald-Times. "What it gives maine is acold much than thing I could springiness to IU. No 1 would cognize who the hellhole I americium if it wasn't for Indiana University."
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