Now that the first 2026 update to the CFB Coaches Database is complete, it’s time to unveil the top coaching staffs in college football!
Teams are ranked by total Standard Win value of the staff, a key analytical metric for coaching staff evaluation. (See the article below the chart to learn more about how coaching ratings are computed.)
Minor update from previous version resulted in changes to some team rankings.
Talent acquisition is an essential part of a college football program’s success.
Traditionally, this took the form of recruiting prospects from the high school and, to a lesser extent, junior college ranks. Transfers were a minor part of a team’s talent profile, typically limited to graduate transfers representing a small proportion of a team roster.
In the Transfer Portal Era, that has changed dramatically. Programs like Colorado under Coach Prime and, more successfully, Indiana under Curt Cignetti have transformed rosters in single offseasons, changing the complexion of how program talent is evaluated.
At mcillecesports.com, we have been computing objective coaching ratings for many years, utilizing our one-of-a-kind CFB Coaches Database and proprietary analytics. Historically, the foundation of the calculation is to compare team power ratings to their “expected” power ratings, conditioned on their composite recruiting levels.
Despite the heavy reliance of many teams on the Transfer Portal, traditional recruiting still forms the backbone of team rosters, especially at blueblood schools like Alabama or Ohio State. And it still forms the basis of the coaching and staff ratings calculated at mcillecesports.com. The important distinction between the current era and the previous era is that the coaching ratings implicitly include the impact of Transfer Portal talent acquisition and attrition.
In the team examples mentioned above, that means Coach Prime and Coach Cignetti’s differing levels of success implicitly include differences in how they navigated the portal. Clearly, Curt Cignetti has excelled in that capacity, while Deion Sanders’s results have been mixed.
And for many bluebloods like Alabama and Ohio State, while they are able to land some top Transfer Portal prospects each year, they are much less dependent on them, still relying primarily on the annual strength of their high school recruiting classes.
The rankings below account for coaching systems, unit performance, and baseline talent levels (from recruiting composites) to compare results on the field to what an average coaching staff versus an average schedule would be expected to achieve. Cobbling together all these factors, these coaching ratings are then scaled to a 12-game regular season to create a projected regular season value for Standard Wins (StdWin*). The StdWin concept is more fully described on the Coach Ratings page.