National Rankings Place 64-Year-Old Head Coach at No. 1 in College Football

Forty years. That is roughly how long Curt Cignetti spent working his way through graduate assistant roles, Division II head coaching stops and FCS programs before he got a shot at a Power Four job. He was 62 years old when Indiana hired him.

Two seasons later, he has a national title, a 27-2 record in Bloomington and, as of this week, the No. 1 spot among all Power Four head coaches, according to CBS Sports experts in Tom Fornelli's annual Power Four coach rankings.

That jump, from 21st a year ago to first today, is unprecedented in the 11-year history of the CBS rankings. No coach has ever made a larger single-season climb to the top spot.

Why Curt Cignetti's rise is different

The easy story here is the scoreboard. Indiana went 16-0, beat No. 1 Ohio State for the Big Ten title, rolled Alabama by 35 in the Rose Bowl and won it all over Miami.

But the more revealing part of Cignetti's career is everything that came before. He spent four seasons under Nick Saban at Alabama as a recruiting coordinator, absorbing a program-building blueprint that most coaches never get close to.

Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti is atop the CBS Sports list of college football's top coaches after a national championship season. | Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images

Then, at age 49, rather than waiting for a better offer, he went to Division II IUP, where his father had coached for 20 years, and started building his own system from scratch.

By the time Indiana came calling, he had a 143-37 career record and had turned around programs at four different stops across three levels of the sport.

Is ranking Cignetti ahead of Kirby Smart and Ryan Day defensible?

This is a question worth asking.

Kirby Smart has a .847 winning percentage at Georgia, two national titles and has reached five straight SEC Championship Games. Ryan Day went 12-2 last season, won a national title in 2024 and has never finished lower than third in these same rankings. Neither coach has had anything close to a bad year.

Ohio State coach Ryan Day, Georgia coach Kirby Smart — Ohio State coach Ryan Day and Georgia coach Kirby Smart are posing for a photo ahead of the College Football Playoff Semifinal in 2022. | Marc Weiszer/Athens Banner-Herald / USA TODAY NETWORK

The counterargument is results, not resumes. Georgia has not won a CFP game since its 2022 national title. The Bulldogs lost in the Sugar Bowl in back-to-back years, and Smart's own admission that Georgia's defense needs to be more disruptive in 2026 signals he knows the program has real work to do. Day, for all his consistency, did not receive a single first-place vote from the CBS panel.

The honest take: one championship run, however dominant, probably should not leapfrog a decade of sustained excellence from two coaches of that caliber. But it is also hard to argue with Indiana's 2025 point differential of plus-479, the highest in the AP Poll era dating back to 1936. Cignetti does not just win. He overwhelms.

Indiana opens its championship defense against North Texas on Sept. 5 at Memorial Stadium in Bloomington.

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