It would be disingenuous to have IU football coach Curt Cignetti anywhere but the top of any attempt to rank the nation’s best college football coaches right now.
Similarly, it wouldn’t make much sense to exclude Cignetti from any preseason watch lists for awards that go to the nation’s best coach.
And that’s the way things are playing out this summer ahead of the 2026 season — Cignetti’s third in Bloomington.
After Cignetti led one of the best turnarounds in sports history over the last two seasons, it’s difficult to justify placing anyone in college football above him. That’s what a panel of 10 ESPN voters concluded, when half of them placed Cignetti in the No. 1 overall spot in their ranking of the nation’s best coaches. He unseated Georgia’s Kirby Smart, who held the spot the prior two years.
Here’s how ESPN summarized Cignetti’s recent performance, and how one of the panelists described his rationale for his Cignetti vote.
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 championships. Indiana with Cignetti (2024 and ’25): .931 winning percentage, two 10-win seasons, one national championship.
Half of our voters had Cignetti No. 1, and you were one of them. Was there any hesitation on your part?
Not really. It takes a special coach to wrangle all the forces at a blue blood the way Kirby Smart has at Georgia while dominating the SEC. If it were easy, everyone who has had one of those jobs could do it. But we’ve never seen anything like what Curt Cignetti has done at Indiana, taking the losingest program in college football history to a national title in two years, after an 11-1 season at James Madison in 2023. In 125 seasons before Cignetti’s arrival, Indiana had never won 10 games and had won nine just twice, in 1945 and 1967, and had three total bowl wins. He is 27-2 in two seasons in Bloomington (with three postseason wins last year alone) and added a national championship trophy during a span where the Big Ten has won three straight titles. If the definition of an elite coach is someone you’d trust to lead any program anywhere, he’s where you start. — Dave Wilson
Similar exercises at CBS Sports, the Athletic and the Sporting News all reached the same conclusion, with Cignetti in the top spot.
Of course there’s no guarantee he’ll repeat the masterclass 16-0 national championship run of 2025. But the below graphic from the Big Ten Network clearly illustrates why there’s no other choice at the moment.
Cignetti was also one of 20 coaches named this week to the preseason watch list for the Dodd Trophy, which goes to the nation’s best coach. He won the award following the 2025 season.
In fact, Cignetti has won 14 of the 17 national coach of the year awards he was eligible to win between the 2024 and 2025 seasons.
If there’s a preseason watch list for national coach of the year, Cignetti simply has to be on it.
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