Lane Kiffin Agrees With James Franklin About College Football's 'Terrible System'

The Penn State and Ole Miss coaches lament December's mad rush ahead of the Peach Bowl.

At Penn State’s local Peach Bowl media day almost two weeks ago, James Franklin was asked about his weekly schedule, which prompted a lengthy response about the current state of college football. He called the model unsustainable, with December serving as a sprint between the postseason, recruiting and the transfer portal. Franklin said sees a world where coaches flee college football because of it.

"I think the only people that can really fix this is the commissioners," Franklin said. "They're the only ones that I think have the power to do it right now. Get all the commissioners in a room for like a week, lock the door with some Chick-fil-a sandwiches [a nod to the Peach Bowl's title sponsor] and like literally A through Z, let's come up with a new model for college football because I don't think this is sustainable — for the players most importantly but also for the coaches and the staff.”

With Peach Bowl festivities officially kicking off this week, Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin had a similar response, plainly calling it a "terrible system.” This week is finally back to normalcy, with game preparations beginning Tuesday for Saturday’s matchup at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, but the month leading up to this was anything but status quo.

“It's been a little chaotic, with not just recruiting and flying around trying to get back for practice, a lot of the assistant coaches not at the practices, but then dealing with the portal, going to other universities to see kids and dealing with keeping our own kids,” Kiffin said Tuesday on a Zoom call with reporters, adding that he wouldn’t think any professional sport would open up free agency while the season was still going on.

“You can leave. You can stay. You can go other places. Coaches can call you. And our season is still going,” Kiffin said. “It would be like before the NFC or AFC playoffs start in a couple weeks, all of a sudden, ‘Hey, free agency the week before opens, so you can start recruiting other people's players and fly them on trips and get them to transfer. So really, a really bad system.”

That comes from someone often nicknamed “The Portal King,” as Kiffin has hauled in former No. 1 high school prospect Walter Nolen out of the portal among a handful of other big names. Ole Miss has more than 20 portal players on its roster, including a bevy of its top contributors. Kiffin also put in the work to convince almost everyone to stay for the bowl game. Just one player, defensive end Cedric Johnson, has opted out of Saturday’s Peach Bowl, and even that surprised Kiffin.

The Ole Miss coach said Tuesday that this has been one of his favorite groups to coach because of the vast number of transfers on the team and how quickly it came together from different backgrounds.

“That doesn't always work, no different than free agency or professional sports. Look at the NBA. They put together these dream teams, and all of a sudden don't have very good seasons once they start going bad,” he said. “So it doesn't always work that way, just like it doesn't always work when you sign 5-star players out of high school that you're going to win.”

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Max Ralph is a Penn State senior studying Broadcast Journalism with minors in sports studies and Japanese. He previously covered Penn State football for two years with The Daily Collegian and has reported with the Associated Press and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Follow him on Twitter (X) @maxralph_ and Instagram @mralph_59.

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