With a few months to go until the 2026 college football season starts in late August, fans have already been asked to weigh in on the sport’s best coach entering the new campaign.
The Athletic surveyed 3,023 readers mid-March, asking who they consider the No. 1 coach in college football following the 2025 season and the Indiana Hoosiers' win over the Miami Hurricanes in the College Football Playoff final.
The results produced a clear consensus, with one coach separating from the rest of the field by a wide margin and getting the overwhelming majority of votes.
And that coach, most likely to no one's surprise, received 67 percent (2,025 out of 3,023) of the vote for No. 1, while also appearing on 90 percent of top-five ballots, both the highest marks in the survey.
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Even when excluding Hoosier fans, Curt Cignetti still earned 65 percent support among all other voters, maintaining a decisive lead over the rest of the field.
The Hoosiers completed a historic turnaround led by Cignetti, going 16-0 and capturing a national title after winning just three Big Ten games in the three seasons before he arrived in Indiana. That run followed an 11-2 campaign in his first year on the Hoosiers' sideline.
“Indiana was just a miracle last year. No one predicted anything like that happening,” one voter said.
The fan vote mirrored The Athletic’s Bruce Feldman's 2026 coach power rankings, in which he named Cignetti as the clear-cut No. 1 man at the job, pointing to both his results and his transformation of the Hoosiers' program.
“What he’s done in two years in Bloomington is, simply put, the most remarkable turnaround in the sport’s history,” Feldman wrote. “He transformed the losingest program in college football history into an 11-2 Playoff team in Year 1 and a 16-0 national champion in Year 2.
“It’s a stretch to think any other coach could’ve done what the 64-year-old Cignetti has done.”
The Hoosiers will open their 2026 season with a game against North Texas on Sept. 5.
