Before the current season started PFF ranked the 20 best coaches in college football

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1. NICK SABAN, ALABAMA

2. DABO SWINNEY, CLEMSON

3. KIRBY SMART, GEORGIA

4. LINCOLN RILEY, OKLAHOMA
One could assume that Riley is just continuing the tradition of excellence left by Bob Stoops, but the Sooners experienced a big dip in offensive output in the mid-2010s. Oklahoma ranked 36th in the nation in EPA per play in 2014 while a team of pirates from East Carolina, led by none other than Lincoln Riley, finished 21st.

Riley was hired as the Sooners' offensive coordinator in 2015, and East Carolina fell to 65th in EPA per play while Oklahoma rose to ninth.

From 2016 to the present day, this is the No. 1 offense in college football by far. Their 0.254 EPA per play mark bests second-place Alabama (0.203) by a relatively significant margin.

5. DAN MULLEN, FLORIDA

6. PAT FITZGERALD, NORTHWESTERN

7. MATT CAMPBELL, IOWA STATE
After going 3-9 in his first year as Iowa State head coach in 2016, Campbell has won 63% of his games in Ames, with three eight-plus-win seasons in his five years.

What Campbell has done is nothing short of remarkable. In 2021, he returns a team talented enough to win ISU’s first conference title. The Cyclones' last four defenses rank eighth, 11th, 14th and 17th in EPA allowed per play among the 40 team seasons in the Big 12 since 2017.

13. JIMBO FISHER, TEXAS A&M
The Florida State dynasty of the late 1980s and 1990s produced 14 straight years where the team finished in the top five of the AP Poll under Bobby Bowden. But that is not the program Jimbo Fisher inherited in 2010.

Even with Fisher serving as offensive coordinator, the team stumbled to three seven-win finishes in the last four years of the Bowden era. Fisher quickly got the program back on track, though, winning 78% of his games and bringing home a National Championship.

After the championship-winning year of 2013, the FSU offenses that ranked 38th nationwide in EPA per play under his watch dropped down to 107th in the three years since he left. FSU has gone 14-20 in that period.

Now he’s revamped the Texas A&M program, going 26-10 in three seasons and coming off a 9-1 season with huge aspirations for a national title hunt in 2021.

14. MARK STOOPS, KENTUCKY
The Stoops era of Kentucky football is a case study in not giving up too soon on a coach when you are not a national power. We look back fondly on the Air Raid team of Hal Mumme in the late 1990s, but they only went 20-26. The Guy Morriss era was short and painful. The Rich Brooks era was longer yet still just as painful. The Joker Phillips era might as well not have happened.

Kentucky welcomed Stoops in 2013 but won just 12 games in three seasons. But instead of kicking him to the curb, the program stayed with him and has gone 23-14 in the last three years, the team's best three-year stint since the mid-1970s.

Kentucky has been a hard team to win with, but Stoops has seemingly transformed them from bottom-feeders to a mid-table team with a chance to upset the apple cart and win the East every once in a while. Their rushing efficiency stands out for a program like this — they’re 14th in the Power Five in EPA per rush over the last three seasons, a mightily impressive figure.

19. BILLY NAPIER, LOUISIANA
Mark Hudspeth improved the Rajin' Cajuns' win total from three to nine in his first year in charge, which started a four-year run of 9-4 finishes and a New Orleans Bowl victory each season. However, he fell to a combined 15-22 over his last three seasons, more in line with what Louisiana is as a program — they had two seasons in their history above the 9-4 mark before Napier took the program in 2018.

Napier has even bettered Hudspeth’s mark. After a decent 7-7 start in 2018, the team is 21-4 over the last two seasons. The former offensive coordinator has produced the second-highest EPA per play figure in the Group of Five over the last two seasons, behind only UCF.

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