Rebels' Lane Kiffin 'Could See' Potential For CFB Preseason Games

Ole Miss Rebels head coach Lane Kiffin is one of the more current-events-savvy college football coaches and is never afraid to speak his mind on hot topics around the sport.

Ole Miss Rebels head coach Lane Kiffin is not like other college coaches.

Most coaches always say they're blocking out the outside noise and strictly focused on in-house things when asked about college football landscape questions. That's not to say Kiffin's primary focus isn't the Rebels, their players, solving the quarterback battle, improving their defense, playing fundamental football and winning games among other things, but he's cognizant of the state of the sport. He pays attention.

Kiffin's spoken out about the problems with name, image and likeness and the transfer portal, while recently taking a stance against the pitfalls of rapid conference realignment most notably by the Big Ten, calling "it what it is:" a cash grab. With most college football coaches, you'd probably have to have a few cold beverages and then still have to pull their teeth to get an answer like that out of them.

But not with Kiffin.

Now, let's circle back to one of the bigger questions in Oxford ahead of the 2023 season: the quarterback competition.

Last week when Kiffin was hashing out the battle, he said there aren't preseason games made available to see how his trio of signal-callers Jaxson Dart, Spencer Sanders and Walker Howard would perform.

"There are times — at least two I can remember — where we've gone into a season not knowing for sure, so we've used some games, our first game to help gather the information to make the decision," Kiffin said of the quarterback timeline Wednesday. "You don't have preseason games so it is hard to judge, and people make the wrong decisions all the time even with preseason games at the next level. I just try to be really careful of saying, 'Well, that's the guy,' and then you haven't even seen him play in the game with you and with the current team."

What if college football adopted the NFL model and played preseason games? What would the scheduling look like? Would it essentially be another Football Championship Series buy-game opponent in August? Could it be played in the spring prior to the fall?

Kiffin said he hasn't given much thought to it, but here's what he came up with Monday.

"I have really not thought about that just because it's never really come up," Kiffin said. "The spring thing's come up where they've talked about maybe we play one spring game or something, but I've not been part of discussions about that, so I haven't given much thought to that. In a few seconds of thinking of it, I could see where there'd be a use of that, but I'm sure that probably creates other problems, too."

College football's conference realignment and monetary figures look very similar to that of the NFL, so it's not crazy to think the NCAA could amend the scheduling model to mirror the professional's as well.

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Follow Casey Smith on Twitter @casey_smith2419

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