College football’s coaches with a national championship top our top-25 list that’s dominated by the Big Ten and SEC.
Kirby Smart headlines a top trio that includes Ryan Day and Dabo Swinney.
Next wave of coaches behind championship trio includes Steve Sarkisian, James Franklin, Dan Lanning.
Only three active college football coaches have won a national championship. Each member of that championship trio is in the top three of our USA TODAY rankings of the nation’s top 25 coaches.
The rest of the top 10 includes coaches who could conceivably capture a national championship one day, based on their winning track records and presence at programs with enough clout to thrive.
The Big Ten leads all conferences with eight coaches ranked in our top 25, followed by the SEC’s seven. Those two conferences account for nine of the coaches ranked within our top 10.
These rankings reflect an aggregate of the ballots of five USA TODAY sportswriters who each voted for their top 25.
Here are our USA TODAY top 25 college football coaches:
1. Kirby Smart (Georgia)
If you want to know how good a coach is, consider what constitutes his down season. Smart’s 11-3 record last year, with an SEC championship and a College Football Playoff berth, is his version of a down season. He raised Georgia’s bar to annual expectations of a national championship. Smart remains an elite recruiter and developer, on top of being an excellent motivator. He’s built Georgia to last.
2. Ryan Day (Ohio State)
COACHES RANKINGS: SEC | Big Ten | Big 12 | ACC
LOOKING AHEAD: Big Ten leads too-early Top 25 after spring
3. Dabo Swinney (Clemson)
Swinney will not go quietly from his perch atop the ACC. Just when you think he might be slipping in this evolved college football world, he rebounds with another ACC championship. And his roster this season is in better shape. Swinney’s aversion to transfers will be a hurdle to winning a third national championship, but his sign, develop and retain mantra keeps Clemson as the ACC’s most consistent force.
4. Steve Sarkisian (Texas)
Texas is back. No more jokes about that subject. It’s true. That’s a credit to Sarkisian. He’s the rare coach who rivals Smart’s recruiting chops, and he’s an excellent quarterback developer. Sarkisian’s best pivot for Texas, though, was re-instilling the beef and toughness at the line of scrimmage the Longhorns lacked for too many years. Sarkisian has instituted the ingredients necessary for Texas to hunt national titles.
5. James Franklin (Penn State)
A national championship continues to elude Franklin and the Nittany Lions, though last year’s team notched a pair of playoff wins to reach the semifinals. While detractors will focus on what he isn’t, Franklin has returned Penn State to national prominence and crafted a Hall of Fame-worthy résumé. As with Day, a title would force a drastic re-evaluation of Franklin’s career.
6. Dan Lanning (Oregon)
While he’s only three seasons in to his career as a head coach, the 39-year-old former Georgia assistant has transformed the Ducks into one of the elite programs in the FBS. After reaching the Fiesta Bowl in the 2023 campaign, last year’s team went unbeaten in the regular season and earned the top seed in the playoff bracket before losing in a rematch against the Buckeyes. Lanning is one of the biggest names among the next wave of coaches.
7. Marcus Freeman (Notre Dame)
Freeman seems to have cracked the code at Notre Dame after a bit of an uneven start to his time as head coach, though early growing pains were expected after the school promoted the then-35-year-old defensive coordinator late in the 2021 season. After the Irish suffered some head-scratching losses in 2022 and 2023, last year’s team lost just once in the regular season before topping Indiana, Georgia and Penn State in the playoff. Freeman’s program stands poised to annually compete for the playoff and the national title.
8. Kalen DeBoer (Alabama)
DeBoer’s Alabama career endured a bumpy debut, but didn’t we all expect that replacing Nick Saban would be a challenge? DeBoer has proven himself a winner at one coaching stop after another, particularly once Year 2 arrives. Pencil him in for at least nine wins annually. He’s recruiting well, albeit not at Saban levels. To curry favor from Alabama fans, his team must play with more discipline and consistency.
9. Lane Kiffin (Mississippi)
Kiffin once envied the coaches’ statues at Alabama. Now, he says, he’s less consumed by the idea of a statue. If he keeps winning like he has at Ole Miss, he might get that statue after all. Once an unpredictable renegade, Kiffin has evolved, becoming more consistent. He’s the Rebels’ best coach since Johnny Vaught. He keeps crushing the transfer portal and developing good quarterbacks. That’s a good formula.
10. Brian Kelly (LSU)
Kelly quietly turned LSU into Quarterback U, with Garrett Nussmeier following Heisman Trophy winner Jayden Daniels. On the downside, he hasn’t found the right formula for LSU’s defense. Kelly showed a warmer embrace to transfers this offseason that might fix the defense. Kelly remains an indefatigable force for posting at least nine wins. That consistency worked for Notre Dame. LSU will expect more of him, eventually.
11. Matt Campbell (Iowa State)
It’s easy to forget where Iowa State was when it hired Campbell. The Cyclones had three consecutive seasons of at least nine losses and just one finish in the coaches’ poll since the 1991 season. In his nine seasons, Campbell has turned the Cyclones from an afterthought to a team that has seven bowl trips in eight seasons. He’s the winningest coach in school history with 64 victories and led ISU to its first double-digit win total last year. Campbell has been mentioned as a candidate at larger programs, but he has stayed and made this one of the country’s biggest overachievers.
12. Kyle Whittingham (Utah)
It’s hard to envision the Utes rising to become a premier program before Whittingham took the baton from Urban Meyer before the team’s 2004 bowl game. Across 20 full seasons, he has positioned a program with limited history into a perennial contender for conference titles behind a consistently stingy defense. The highlights include 167 wins in Whittingham’s tenure with 16 bowl appearances and Pac-12 titles in Utah’s final two seasons in the league. Whittingham is expected to step down in the coming seasons with assistant Morgan Scalley due to take over the job.
13. Curt Cignetti (Indiana)
All Cignetti does is win, even at Indiana. Last year’s team was the feel-good story of the Power Four after losing just once in the regular season and booking a playoff berth. Whether or not that’s sustainable is moot: Cignetti has worked wonders at every stop along the way in a head coaching career that began on the Division II level. He’s 130-37 overall across four college stops.
14. Kirk Ferentz (Iowa)
The longest-tenured coach in the FBS and the dean of the Big Ten coaching community continues to stack winning seasons. Iowa has won at least eight games in every non-COVID season since 2015 and has posted a losing record just once since 2006. While his preferred style of play has its detractors, you can’t argue with the Hawkeyes’ consistent success punching above their weight and annual push for a major bowl.
15. Chris Klieman (Kansas State)
An old-school approach has helped Klieman lead his teams to winning records every season but one since he started at North Dakota State in 2014. With Kansas State, the Wildcats are 48-28 in his six seasons, with the 2020 campaign impacted by COVID-19 the only year they missed a bowl game. Kansas State still won at least nine games the past three years, including a Big 12 title in 2022.
16. Jeff Brohm (Louisville)
Brohm makes programs better, whether that’s Western Kentucky, Purdue or now Louisville. He’ll make sure you’re punching at or above your weight. His offenses persistently thrive. Brohm’s career arc reflects a gradual, steady upward march. Now that the Louisville native is home coaching the Cardinals, he should settle in for a consistent run of ACC relevance.
17. Josh Heupel (Tennessee)
If Tennessee didn’t hit rock bottom after firing Jeremy Pruitt amid an NCAA investigation, it at least could reach down and touch the bottom. Then Josh Heupel arrived and pulled the Vols out of peril. He’s beaten Alabama twice. He jolted Tennessee’s offense to life with his warp-speed system. In a sign of coaching growth, he made the playoff by building a good defense. He’s a coach with a high floor, even if he might be nearing his ceiling.
18. Matt Rhule (Nebraska)
Rhule is starting to pull Nebraska back toward relevancy, just as he did during previous stints at Temple and Baylor. His disciplined approach should yield a breakthrough for the Cornhuskers in 2025. After turning the Owls into a Group of Five power and cleaning up a messy situation with the Bears, performing a third FBS turnaround would bolster Rhule’s case for being seen as one of the top rebuilders in the sport.
19. Bret Bielema (Illinois)
Bielema and his meat-and-potatoes style has yielded another Big Ten winner at Illinois. After winning 10 games last season, the Illini head into 2025 with a major shot at the playoff with one of the most experienced rosters in the Power Four. He’s clearly back in his comfort zone in the Big Ten after a failed five-year run at Arkansas. Before the Razorbacks, Bielema won 68 games and led teams to three Rose Bowl appearances in seven seasons at Wisconsin.
20. Kalani Sitake (Brigham Young)
Sitake took over his alma mater when it was operating as an independent. He raised BYU’s profile with a pair of double-digit win seasons prior to joining the Big 12 for the 2023 season. After an uneventful debut, the Cougars went 11-2 last season and were just a few plays from being in the playoff. BYU is back to winning, as it has seven bowl appearances in Sitake’s nine seasons, and he’s an impressive 45-18 since 2020.
21. Lance Leipold (Kansas)
Leipold is one of the rare examples of a coach rising from outside Division I to a job at a Power Four conference. He won six national titles at Wisconsin-Whitewater before giving up the comfort of being one of the dominant Division III schools to take over at Buffalo. The Bulls went to three bowl games in a row at the end of his six-year tenure before arriving at Kansas in 2021. Leipold’s success is modest by some standards with 22 wins and two bowl appearances in four seasons. But when you consider the Jayhawks had nine victories in the previous six years, this is clearly one of the great rebuilding jobs in recent history.
22. Rhett Lashlee (SMU)
With Lashlee at the wheel, the Mustangs made a breezy transition from the American Athletic Conference to the ACC. His teams consistently beat up on most of their conference opponents, a handy trick considering in-conference excellence provides an avenue to the playoff, which SMU reached last season. Lashlee elevated SMU to a level of relevance not seen since its rule-flouting Pony Express days.
23. Lincoln Riley (Southern California)
Riley’s reputation has suffered with the Trojans’ 13-11 mark over the past two years, marking the first major test of a coaching career that had gone extremely well through his first six seasons in charge at USC and Oklahoma. That’s led to some doubts over whether his offensive style is suited to succeed in the Big Ten. But Riley went 11-3 in his debut at USC and made three playoff appearances at Oklahoma, where he went 55-10 overall with four top-six finishes in the coaches’ poll. He’s also the only coach in FBS history to coach three different Heisman Trophy-winning quarterbacks.
24. Eli Drinkwitz (Missouri)
Drinkwitz made winning 21 games the past two seasons look much easier than it’s historically been for Missouri. His best move was surrendering play-calling before the 2023 season so he could focus more on being the program’s CEO. The offense improved, and Drinkwitz became a better coach. Missouri packs a punch in the portal sweepstakes, giving the Tigers staying power.
25. Mario Cristobal (Miami)
Recruiting is Cristobal’s super-skill. He’s a consistent force in assembling talent, which remains the surest path to success in this sport. He’s proven himself as a recruiter of both high school prospects and transfers. For his program to take the next step, Cristobal must develop his game-day coaching chops. Miami flubbed a playoff opportunity last season by losing winnable games.
Just missed our list: Dan Mullen (UNLV), Bronco Mendenhall (Utah State), Jeff Monken (Army) and Kenny Dillingham (Arizona State)