Kirby Smart has produced 84 NFL draft picks in 10 years at Georgia. Curt Cignetti needed exactly two years at Indiana to turn a draft afterthought into the program that produced the No. 1 overall pick. On the latest episode of PFSN’s Football Debate Club, those two resumes went head to head over a question every elite recruit’s family eventually faces.
Host Cam Mellor framed it for analysts Ian Cummings and Oliver Hodgkinson: if your son were being recruited and his ultimate dream was playing in the NFL, which head coach would you want him to play for?
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Cummings, PFSN’s NFL Draft analyst, went straight to the trajectory in Bloomington.
“There’s a lot of candidates, but the prime thing on my mind would be, I want him to be coached the right way, in a way that’s translatable,” Cummings said.
“I think the best coach for that right now is Curt [Cignetti]. In his first year at Indiana, he gave them multiple draft picks for the first time since 2018. In his second year, this past year, he broke the Indiana school record for draft picks in a cycle and had the most selections since 1976.”
The receipts are real. Indiana sent two players to the 2025 draft, its first multiple-pick class in seven years, then shattered a 50-year-old program record with eight selections in 2026, topping the mark of seven set in 1976. Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza went No. 1 overall to the Las Vegas Raiders, Indiana’s first first-round pick since 1994, and the Hoosiers’ 10 picks over two cycles nearly match the 11 they produced in the entire previous decade.
“The immediate transition you’ve seen to pure production with him has been impossible to ignore,” Cummings said. “You look at how his players play. They play smart, disciplined, physical in a way that’s translatable to the NFL game, if you’re a backup or a starter.”
Kirby Smart’s NFL Draft Numbers Are Untouchable
Hodgkinson, PFSN’s college football analyst, loved the Cignetti story. He just couldn’t pick it over the institution in Athens.
“I absolutely love Curt [Cignetti], and I’ve loved everything that he’s done in his career,” Hodgkinson said. “But when you look at the question, it’s got to be Kirby Smart. I don’t see how it’s anyone other than Kirby Smart. 84 NFL draft selections as a head coach, 21 first-round picks as a head coach, 15 players in 2022 selected from the Georgia Bulldogs, which is still the most from a single program in any one draft cycle. Those numbers are ridiculous.”
Every figure holds up. Georgia’s 15-pick haul in 2022 remains the single-draft record, surviving runs from Michigan (13 in 2024) and Ohio State (14 in 2025). And Smart’s 21 first-rounders carry a viral footnote: it’s the exact number of games he has lost in his career, with a 117-21 record that includes two national championships and four SEC titles.
“College football win, tick the box. College football great, tick the box,” Hodgkinson said.
Mellor’s lone ding on the Smart pick was Georgia’s well-documented off-field driving issues, then he sided with Cummings and Cignetti, an old-school coach in a new-school world, evening the episode at 5-5.
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The verdict reveals what the draft-pick arms race actually measures. Smart sells a decade of certainty; Cignetti sells the steepest development curve in the sport. For a program, take the machine. But for one player with one window, the coach who just turned walk-ons and FCS transfers into draft picks might be the better bet on what he’d do with blue-chip talent.
