5W AI Communications has published Study 08 of The Reputation Index — an audit of how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews render the 22 Power 4 and Notre Dame head coaches active in the 2025 season. The findings run counter to how the sport is used to being ranked.
Kirby Smart tops the cohort at composite 78. Bill Belichick lands at 76 — in his first month as a college head coach, before calling a single college play. Matt Rhule anchors the bottom at 48, dragged down by a Carolina Panthers firing that happened four years ago and shows no sign of leaving his portrait.
This is what happens when reputation moves from the sports desk to the answer engine.
The Belichick anomaly is the finding
The traditional way to rank a college coach is by results. Wins, championships, recruiting classes, bowl records. Belichick has zero of any of those at UNC. The AI engines rank him second in the sport anyway — because they retrieve everything ever written about him, and 24 years of Patriots coverage is more material than any active college coach can generate in a decade.
The 5W study calls this reputational inheritance. A first-year college coach with no NFL portrait renders at roughly composite 50 to 55. Belichick starts at 76. The +20 lift is not what Chapel Hill did. It is what New England did.
The same mechanic runs in reverse. Matt Rhule at Nebraska has a strong Temple record, a Baylor rebuild that produced a Sugar Bowl team, and a mid-rebuild Cornhusker program. The engines surface the 11-27 Panthers tenure in 65 percent of Rhule identity prompts. Positive Temple and Baylor framing gets compressed. The Nebraska portrait sits on top of the Panthers anchor whether Rhule wins Saturday or not.
Why the cohort matters beyond football
Every executive cohort 5W has measured — NFL owners, hedge fund principals, media chiefs, PE founders — moves slowly. Portraits accrete. A CEO can go six months between events material enough to change the engine rendering.
College football coaches move at a completely different frequency. The season resets the anchor every fall. The transfer portal and NIL era generate continuous coverage the coach does not fully control. The move economy runs hot — Belichick to UNC, DeBoer to Alabama, Freeman to Notre Dame, Moore to Michigan, all within eighteen months. Portraits shift 15-plus composite points across a single season.
That volatility cuts both ways. A coach with a well-managed AI portrait can build a Kirby-Smart-tier rendering in half the time it took Smart to build his — because the engines are updating faster. A coach with no AI-portrait management gets whatever the game-week coverage produces. In a losing season, that is a very short walk to a coaching-change conversation.
The AD question
The Control score in this cohort — the dimension that measures how much of the engine portrait the principal and their institution appear to shape — averages 53. Lowest of any sector 5W has measured. It is not a talent problem. It is an assignment problem. Nobody at the athletic department has been given the specific job of managing the coach's AI portrait.
The athletic director who takes that job on changes the recruiting conversation, the retention conversation, the extension conversation, and the sponsor-selection conversation. The one who does not takes whatever the engines return next Tuesday morning when a recruit's father runs the search.
Read the full study
Full ranking, dimension-level scores, engine-portrait analysis, and methodology are live at 5wpr.com/reputation-index/college-football-coaches. Series hub and prior studies at 5wpr.com/reputation-index. 5W newsroom coverage at 5wpr.com/new.
Study 09 — Family Office Principals — closes the sports and finance phases. The annual flagship publishes in December.
Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.