In an era of increasingly sanitized soundbites and thoughts, Lane Kiffin remains perhaps college football’s most refreshingly candid head coach.
Thursday at the annual Southeastern Conference Media Days in Nashville, Kiffin continued to speak his truth to the sport – addressing “the disaster that we’re in” as it pertains to both the NCAA Transfer Portal and Name, Image and Likeness quagmires around the sport.
Kiffin both knows his Ole Miss program has benefitted from both elements but also has indicated the present iterations of both have emerged as unsustainable in the sport – or collegiate athletics.
“First off, I've always said that I think it's phenomenal that players get a chance to get paid, which is great,” said Kiffin, the former head coach at FAU, Southern Cal, Tennessee and the Oakland Raiders. “I do think, which I've stood up here and said before when it first happened, that there's going to be some major issues and we're creating free agency with the portal.
“And with NIL, you've got a lot of pay-for-play going on and that is what it is. Those two things combining, there's not a system in place. I don't think there's any other sports at any level that are like this, that really, you every year, can opt into free agency. Really, twice a year.”
Kiffin’s “free agency” refrain is a familiar one for the mercurial head coach, whose current roster features more than 40 transfers from four-year institutions.
But as Kiffin notes, as college football shifts closer to a de facto professional system, the established pro sports all have guidelines for free agency – elements Kiffin believes are lacking from the NCAA’s current setting.
“I was just thinking on the plane ride over here: What if you had that in other sports?,” Kiffin asked reporters. “Tom Brady, A'Ja Wilson, Lionel Messi, LeBron James, what if every year those (athletes) can opt to free agency, twice a year, really, and they have no long-term contracts? Basically everybody is not even on a one-month contract because they can leave in two windows.
“It's created a lot of issues and roster changes. I'm not complaining about it because we take advantage of free agency, but at the same time, I don't think that's really good for college football. These massive overhauls of rosters every year, really, is not in the best interest of college football.”
Kiffin also noted the continued lack of any semblance of uniform oversight or regulations on NIL deals – for which Ole Miss has been tabbed as among college football’s most effective – have similarly resulted in an absolute free-for-all.
“We have created, I've said it before, we've got different caps and no luxury taxes,” Kiffin said. “So we've got professional sports, because that really is what we are, what's been created now, and there's no caps on what guys can make or what teams' payrolls are.
“When this first came out, (I) basically said, whatever programs have the most aggressive boosters with the most money are going to get the players. And now we are adding some states that you don't have to follow the NCAA, and now the university can take their money and give it to the collective to give it to the players.
“So now we really have pay-for-play that the biggest schools with the most donors, most aggressive, and the school wants to spend the most money paying the players to play to come to their school, is where we are with that.”
As he stressed he wasn’t the only coach to raise these concerns, Kiffin double-down on the pay-for-play landscape.
“Whoa, this is a disaster coming because you just legalized cheating and you just told donors they can pay the players is what you did,” Kiffin said of his assessment of NIL in its current format.
“And it's supposed to be set up -- well, really it's for your name, image, likeness, for your marketing. Again, that's not what happened. That's not what's happening. They are getting paid to go to school. So it's pay-for-play.”