Lane Kiffin, Ole Miss are happily exploiting 'a major issue' in NCAA transfer portal rules
OXFORD — Ole Miss football coach Lane Kiffin thinks the NCAA's transfer portal rules are broken. Kiffin also might be exploiting the broken system better than anyone else.
Ole Miss essentially gave up on targeting high school talent in advance of Wednesday's signing day. Instead, Kiffin and his staff attacked the transfer portal. As of Tuesday, the Rebels have the nation's No. 2 transfer portal class, according to 247Sports, headlined by former Southern Cal quarterback Jaxson Dart, former TCU running back Zach Evans and 11 other Division I transfers.
The way Kiffin talks about portal recruiting, he sounds less like a coach reaping its benefits and more like someone floating anxiously on a balloon he expects to pop at any moment.
"You basically have year-round free agency in football," Kiffin said. "Which is obviously a major issue. It's why they don't do it in the NFL. It is what it is. We're just trying to make the best of the rules and the situation."
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Complaining about the transfer portal after using it to add potential starters is like complaining to a casino for letting you win the jackpot on a slot machine that you rigged. The current system isn't just benefitting Kiffin: Ole Miss' coach said he and his staff are actively looking for innovative ways to attack the transfer portal since it's too new for established strategies.
Whatever Ole Miss is doing, it's working. Kiffin raves about everyone from Dart and Evans to tight end Michael Trigg, defensive lineman JJ Pegues and linebacker Troy Brown. He's excited most of the players aren't rented graduate transfers like 2021 starters Chance Campbell and Orlando Umana; these are plug-and-play recruits with three years of eligibility left.
The big problem
Still, Kiffin sees college football recruiting heading down a complicated path because of its intertwined relationship with name, image and likeness payments. He compares recruiting high school players to the NFL Draft and recruiting the transfer portal to NFL free agency. But the NFL has a salary cap, multi-year contracts and limits on when free agents can sign.
"We don't have the same funding and resources as some of these schools do to do these NIL deals," Kiffin lamented. "It's basically like dealing with different salary caps. We now have a sport that has completely different salary caps and some of these schools are five or 10 times more than everybody else of what they can pay these players. I know nobody uses those phrases, but that is what it is. I joked the other day that I didn't know if Texas A&M was going to incur a luxury tax in how much they paid for their signing class."
The league Kiffin describes isn't the NFL. It's Major League Baseball, where the New York Yankees can spend 7.2 times more money on players than the Baltimore Orioles despite playing in the same division.
The difference? If a player wants to leave the Orioles for the Yankees, he has to wait for his contract to expire or demand a trade and see if his front office obliges. If a player wants to leave USC for Ole Miss as Dart and Trigg did, he can do it any time until the season starts and still play that season.
This is great news for players. Players have more freedom than ever before to make decisions about their future and get paid for their work.
But it's a massive headache for coaches.
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"The NFL knows what they're doing," Kiffin said. "It's not open free agency all-year-round for a reason. You've got long-term contracts for a reason. Kids can't leave at any point of any year all the time.
"Somehow they're going to, I bet, try to control NIL because now you've got these salary caps at places giving players millions of dollars to play before they ever even play and other places not being able to do that. What would the NFL look like if there were a couple of teams in the NFL where their salary cap was 10 times more than anybody else's salary cap? That's where you're headed. They're going to have to do something."
Kiffin said he doesn't know where this solution needs to come from. But whether it comes from congressional legislation, a rule change from the NCAA or a newly-established, independent advisory committee, Kiffin thinks change needs to happen.
Until then, Kiffin is going to keep trying to game the system as best he can, even if he thinks of Ole Miss more like the Orioles than the Yankees.
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"They make the rules," Kiffin said. "I just try to come up with ways to attack them and do the best in the situation they put us in and allow us to be in. I am proud of our staff because I think we maximized it and did a great job and didn't lose very many players that had roles here. ... I am proud of our staff for saying, 'OK, here's the rules in the portal,' and trying to figure out through the end of the season with all that going on and just trying to do it better than anybody else does it. I'm proud of that."
Contact Nick Suss at 601-408-2674 or nsuss@gannett.com. Follow @nicksuss on Twitter.
This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Lane Kiffin, Ole Miss happy to benefit from broken NCAA transfer rules
