Joel Klatt on Kirby Smart no longer being CFB's best coach

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Fox Sports analyst Joel Klatt believes there could be a new best head coach. On “The Next Round” podcast, he said there’s a case to be made that Indiana Hoosiers head coach Curt Cignetti passes Kirby Smart in the head coach rankings if the Hoosiers win the national championship.

“Yeah, you can make the argument,” Klatt said on the podcast Monday. “Some would disagree, but there’s no doubt, and, by the way, Kirby hasn’t even been in the final four in the last three years. Three years is a long time, that’s basically a whole cycle, almost a whole cycle of college players, we are approaching very quickly a roster full of kids at Georgia who have never even played in the final four.”

It speaks to the irony of the modern College Football Playoff that Georgia has won the SEC championship each of the last two years, and yet another SEC team has made it further than them every year. Still, Klatt points out that Georgia doesn’t have any returning starters from the 2022 national championship team, and Drew Bobo and Earnest Greene II are the only potential returning players from that championship squad.

Meanwhile, Indiana has been revitalized as a program overnight. Before the Curt Cignetti era, Indiana hadn’t won a bowl game since winning the Copper Bowl in 1992. Now, they have the second highest single-season point differential in history (+473, behind the 2013 Florida State Seminoles with +553), and they’ve won by 30 or more against both of the CFP opponents.

Klatt also believes that the SEC is no longer the strongest conference in football. “This narrative that the SEC is somehow vastly superior than the rest of college football. That’s dead, as dead as it can possibly be,” said Joel Klatt, “This idea of the gauntlet of the SEC, dead. As dead as it could possibly be.”

Of course, the NFL draft still shows the SEC has more players than any other conference year after year.

No SEC team has made the national championship since Georgia won it in 2022. Meanwhile, the Big Ten has had a participant in the national championship every year since 2023, and Indiana winning would make it three straight years that the Big Ten has won the national championship.

The biggest draw with Cignetti right now is that he is doing less with more. In 2024 and 2025, his overall classes (composite and transfer portal) ranked 46th and 39th in the nation (according to 247Sports). Meanwhile, Kirby Smart has never had lower than a top 10 class in any year at Georgia. Hopefully Smart and Georgia can get over the hump of the quarterfinal in 2026, but as it stands, there are a few people doubting his place atop the college football head coaches’ leaderboard.

Joel Klatt believes the SEC is not the best conference in CFB

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This article originally appeared on UGA Wire: Joel Klatt doesn’t believe Kirby Smart is the top CFB coach

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