$105 million SEC head coach ranked No. 2 coach in college football

A head coach at an SEC program has been ranked as the second-best head coach in college football.

Georgia Bulldogs head coach Kirby Smart looks on before the game against the Mississippi State Bulldogs at Davis Wade Stadium | Wesley Hale-Imagn Images

The 2025 college football season came to an end with the second installment of the 12-team College Football Playoff, one that ended with Indiana defeating Miami for its first-ever football national championship.

One of the 12 participants in the 2025 College Football Playoff was Georgia. The Bulldogs received the No. 3 seed but fell in the Sugar Bowl for the second consecutive season, a disappointing result for a program that boasts two national championship victories under head coach Kirby Smart.

With the season over two weeks in the rearview mirror, the media is breaking down all of its action. These breakdowns, among other things, feature rankings of the best games, player performances and coaching jobs of 2025.

J.D. PicKell of On3 released an updated list of the ten best coaches in college football on The Hard Count on Wednesday. PicKell listed Smart as the No. 2 coach in college football behind Curt Cignetti of Indiana.

"The conversation in this list with Kirby Smart is kind of like how you assess a college GPA on a résumé," PicKell said. "It's not everything, it's not what matters most to me, but we'd be idiots to not at least factor it into this discussion. I want to go back to those (last) two SEC championships; he won those SEC championships with different quarterbacks and two very different teams. The common denominator in Georgia's success over the last decade or so is Kirby Smart."

Smart is one of the most prominent branches from Nick Saban's coaching tree in college football. He served as Saban's defensive backs coach at LSU in 2004, safeties coach with the Miami Dolphins in 2006 and defensive backs coach at Alabama in 2007 before becoming Saban's defensive coordinator for the following eight seasons.

Georgia Bulldogs head coach Kirby Smart celebrates after the Bulldogs beat the Auburn Tigers at Jordan-Hare Stadium. | John Reed-Imagn Images

The SEC Championship game is a place Georgia has lived in Kirby Smart's decade on the job, only missing the game in 2016 and 2020. The Bulldogs are 4-4 in the SEC Championship game under Smart, with three of the four losses coming to Nick Saban-coached Alabama teams and the other to LSU in 2019.

Georgia's 2017 SEC Championship win over Auburn (28-7) snapped a seven-year losing streak for SEC East division representatives in the game. Georgia's other SEC Championship win in the 14-team era was against LSU (50-30) in 2022, and as PicKell alluded to, the Bulldogs have won both SEC Championships in the 16-team era against Texas (22-19) in 2024 and Alabama (28-7) in 2025.

Smart is one of just four active head coaches in FBS to have won a national title, along with Curt Cignetti, Ryan Day and Dabo Swinney. Of the four, only Smart and Swinney have won two national championships.