Ranking college football's top coaches for the 2026 season - ESPN

Who is the best college football coach in the country?

For the past two years, ESPN's panel of reporters chose Georgia's Kirby Smart in a runaway. In 2026? Not so fast.

The remarkable surge orchestrated by Curt Cignetti at Indiana, culminating in the program's first national championship last season, understandably drew a lot of attention. Would Cignetti's meteoric rise unseat Smart's consistency over his decade with the Dawgs? And who else is on the rise in the eyes of our voters?

We posed the question to our reporters by asking which coaches they would most want leading their (fictional) team for the coming season, not necessarily the coaches who have accumulated the best résumés over their careers. Each person listed their top 10 choices, and points were given based on their responses (10 points for first, 9 points for second and so on). We then asked our voters to explain some of their picks.

Here are the rankings and the voters' responses, along with some stats provided by ESPN Research.

Previous rankings: Defensive players | Running backs | Receivers | Non-QB playmakers | Top 100 newcomers

Record: 46-6, .885 winning percentage (27-2 at Indiana)

Points: 94 (five of 10 first-place votes)

Last year's ranking: Not ranked

Numbers to know: Cignetti is the first head coach to win a national championship within his first two seasons at a school since Gene Chizik did it in 2010 in his second season at Auburn.… Cignetti's 27 wins in his two seasons in Bloomington are two more than any other coach in his first two years at a school since the AP poll debuted in 1936. (Kalen DeBoer won 25 games at Washington in 2022 and '23.)… Indiana before Cignetti (1887-2023): .419 winning percentage, no 10-win seasons or national