Two-time National Champion Left Off Joel Klatt’s Top 10 College Football Coaches

Fox Sports College Football Analyst Joel Klatt revealed his first-ever ranking of the Top 10 head coaches in the sport on Monday. Missing from the list is a coach with two National Championships in the last decade.

Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney has two National Championships and nine ACC titles to his credit, but is not considered one of the Top 10 head coaches in the game at this time. | Jeff Blake-Imagn Images

On Monday’s edition of The Joel Klatt Show, the Fox Sports College Football analyst broke down his Top 10 head coaches currently in college football. Missing from that list, however, was a head coach with two National Championships in the last decade.

Klatt is Fox Sports’ lead college football analyst, regularly calling the top games on the network each Saturday in the fall, and his podcast can draw upwards of 100,000 views on YouTube during the season. Ranking coaches, many of whom Klatt relies on to help inform his analysis, is dangerous waters, however, and Klatt acknowledged that is the reason he has never done a ranking of the best head coaches in the sport.

Fox Sports analyst Joel Klatt (right) included Ohio State's Ryan Day (left) near the top of college football's best head coaches. | Doral Chenoweth/Columbus Dispatch / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

There is no longer a Nick Saban or Urban Meyer who stands alone as the standard by which all other college football head coaches are measured, and the top of Klatt’s list revealed that. Recent National Championship winners Curt Cignetti (Indiana) and Ryan Day (Ohio State) came in at Nos. 1 and 2, and Klatt acknowledged that recency was a strong factor in the decision criteria.

“The coaches on this list had to have excelled… basically, post-COVID, and more specifically in the last 2, 3, 4 years,” Klatt said. “That’s the picture I am trying to create.” 

The totality of a coach’s resume, then, apparently did not mean as much as what they have achieved recently, and that means a lot of really accomplished head coaches did not make the cut. The most accomplished current college football head coach left off the list, at least when adding up National Championships, is Clemson’s Dabo Swinney.

Permanently hired to lead Clemson football in 2009 after being the interim head coach during the second half of the 2008 season following Tommy Bowden’s resignation, Swinney is about to enter his 18th season as the Tiger’s head coach. During his tenure, Clemson has won nine ACC Championships and it won National Championships in 2016 and 2018.

Dabo Swinney's stance on topics like NIL has evolved over the years after initially showing strong resistance to the idea. | Ken Ruinard / USA Today Co Inc SC / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

Swinney, however, is coming off his worst season as head coach at Clemson since 2010, going 7-6 and losing in the Pinstripe Bowl to a Penn State team that had fired its head coach earlier in the season. The Tigers did make the College Football Playoff the year prior, but bowed out in the first round after a loss to Texas, and Swinney is on the hot seat heading into the 2026 season.

Clemson is still one of the Top 5 winningest teams in college football over the last decade, but much of the success they have enjoyed occurred prior to COVID and the current era of NIL and the Transfer Portal. Swinney has had a troubled history with NIL, specifically, initially showing strong resistance to the idea of college football players playing for money.

Whether Swinney continues on as Clemson’s head football coach following the 2026 season likely depends on his ability to navigate the rapid changes the sport has experienced in recent years. So, for now, Swinney is omitted from Klatt’s list of the Top 10 college football head coaches currently in the game, despite his lengthy list of accomplishments at Clemson.