Three SEC schools have their sights on Lane Kiffin leading their program going forward: his current program, the likely College Football Playoff-bound Ole Miss, as well as Florida and LSU, which have high-profile job openings.
Florida and LSU are both considered among the best jobs in the sport, with built-in geographic advantages that Mississippi doesn’t have, though Kiffin has proven that he can elevate the Rebels program to a similar place through his dynamic play-calling … and his expert use of the transfer portal. In a year that was slated to be something of a rebuild after losing players like Jaxson Dart to the NFL, Ole Miss is having one of its greatest seasons ever, but now doesn’t know whether it will have its head coach for the playoff.
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To Kiffin’s former boss Nick Saban, this is an untenable situation that needs to be rectified. He spoke passionately about the issue during Saturday’s from Eugene, Ore.
Nick Saban believes college football should adopt an NFL-like timeline for coaching changes as Lane Kiffin weighs his options
The NFL has rules and timelines that franchises need to follow to interview active coaches. The situation is a bit different, as sitting head coaches leaving for other jobs is exceptionally rare and most movement is from coordinators taking head coaching jobs. Even so, it is not difficult to envision a better calendar for college football than the system we have in place at the moment, where the December early signing period pushes schools to have their situations settled in the middle of the CFP.
“Everybody should be thinking about the players, everybody should be thinking about the student-athletes. What’s best for the student-athletes? Players should be able to play for his coach for the entire season,” Saban said. “Players shouldn’t be penalized if a coach leaves because the committee has the opportunity if a player or a coach doesn’t participate, they can sink you in the rankings. So Ole Miss could go down in the rankings, maybe lose a home game, so their players are getting penalized.
“We need to take a better approach to the business aspect of what we do in college athletics. In the NFL, you cannot leave your team until you finish playing. You can’t talk to another coach in the regular season. There’s a defined time you can talk to them if they’re in the playoffs. That’s the way it should be. And we should match the academic calendar with the football calendar. And we shouldn’t have an early singing day that conflicts with people wanting to hire an early coach, fire your coach early. None of this is fair to the players. If we did all that in May, and then had some kind of OTA days in summertime instead of spring practice, we wouldn’t have all these issues and players could actually finish the year.
“So this is not a Lane Kiffin conundrum, this is a college football conundrum that we need some leadership to step up and change the rules on how this gets done in terms of coaching searches and opportunities for people to leave. … That’s the way it should be regardless of what Lane decides to do.”
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Kiffin isn’t blameless in this situation
As he did with the Auburn job a few years ago, Kiffin hasn’t done much to diffuse the smoke here. If he is intent on staying at Ole Miss, he could have made that call much earlier. If he does want to take the reported mega-deal from LSU or head to Florida, he could tell those schools he intends to coach out the playoff, and deal with the transfer portal and recruiting repercussions later. If he’s the right coach, one down recruiting class should be a worthy price to pay.
It is also helpful to Kiffin that he has a former boss (and the most famous client of Kiffin’s agent, Jimmy Sexton of CAA) in Saban on the panel as perhaps the most trusted voice in the sport to share a message that largely absolves him of blame in this situation.
Saban may be right about the sport’s calamitous calendar needing a fix—and the lack of top-down leadership in the sport is an issue in many ways even beyond this one situation—but no one is forcing Kiffin to bail on his school in the middle of its best season in decades.
