USA Today Names Curt Cignetti the Top College Football Coach Entering 2026
Indiana’s Curt Cignetti just got the ultimate offseason nod. USA Today put together its Top 25 college football coach rankings entering the 2026 season, and Cignetti took the No. 1 spot.
That is a wild sentence. The Indiana Hoosiers, a program that has spent most of its history buried at the bottom of the Big Ten, now employs the top-ranked college football coach in America according to a major national outlet.
The reason is simple. Cignetti won a national championship last year. He has gone 27-2 overall and 17-1 in the Big Ten across his first two seasons in Bloomington. He turned Indiana into a top-five program before most of the sport had time to catch up.
What Cignetti has done at Indiana ranks with the best coaching turnarounds of the modern era. The Hoosiers were a joke of a football program for decades. Their winning streak in Big Ten conference play was measured in single digits over multiple seasons. Now they are the defending national champions.
The scheme is real. Cignetti runs an offense that hits explosive plays and controls the middle of the field. The defense is aggressive and creates turnovers. The special teams unit is one of the best in the country. He is not doing one thing. He is doing everything.
Kirby Smart of Georgia is right behind him in the rankings. Smart has three SEC titles in four years and continues to recruit at a level nobody else in the country can match. Ryan Day at Ohio State, Steve Sarkisian at Texas and a few other familiar names round out the top 10.
What is notable about the top of the rankings is how many programs are represented by first- or second-year head coaches. New coaches Alex Golesh and Jon Sumrall inherit two of the SEC’s proudest programs. If they succeed, the SEC gets back to being the top conference in the sport. If they struggle, the Big Ten’s grip on the national title picture keeps tightening.
Cignetti’s 2026 Indiana team is not going to sneak up on anyone. Every opponent is going to circle the Hoosiers on the schedule. The target is on their back. That is when great coaches separate themselves from good ones. Repeating a national championship is one of the hardest things to do in college football, and the last team to go back-to-back was Georgia in 2021-22.
Indiana lost some pieces from the title team. Cignetti did what he always does and reloaded through the transfer portal. The Hoosiers are still going to be one of the best teams in the country, even if the roster does not look identical.
Recruiting is where Cignetti has actually taken the biggest jump. Indiana is now landing top prospects at positions where they used to be an afterthought. The NIL money is real. The academic reputation is solid. The winning has done the rest.
The Big Ten is stacked. Ohio State, Michigan, Oregon and Penn State are all going to be very good. Indiana has to navigate a conference schedule that is now considered the hardest in the sport.
Cignetti’s ranking is a huge sign of respect. It is also going to raise expectations even higher.
Indiana football. Defending national champions. Best coach in America. That is where we are.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
