Lane Kiffin Keeps It Real: Ole Miss Built for the Future in a Salary-Cap Style System
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ATLANTA — When Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin departed the Oakland Raiders, he may have thought he had left professional football behind.
But joining the ranks of the college game brought back some memories from the rear view mirror.
Sure, the NCAA does not have trade deadlines, open free agency and hard salary caps, but the two games are becoming closer as each season passes.
“We get a lot of questions like, what’s it like now?” Kiffin said at the opening session of Southeastern Conference Media Days.
“We’ve been operating — we have — under these cap guidelines of what was coming and what it was going to look like. I think we’ve done a really good job of that.”
Lane Kiffin
The Rebels have done a good job of navigating the murkiness of today’s college football waters. But still questions remain for the college coaches.
“Obviously (it) means you can’t sign as many players as you would like at times because you have a budget,” Kiffin said.
“So we’re obviously hopeful that we will be rewarded by doing that. I think it’s obvious people aren’t staying within that cap, so I think the whole thing will be, what does that look like? That’s what we don’t know. What does it look like when you don’t and what are the punishments for that? Do you win and that comes later?”
Lane Kiffin
If that statement is true, what is the future of college football?
“So that’s remaining to be seen,” Kiffin said. “But I’ve already got the questions about the cap, what that’s like having to do that. We’ve been doing that for a while, operating on that.”
In the future, the big question in college football is not going to be the recruiting rankings. It will be how well a coach recruits last year’s roster to remain for next year’s team.
“If you go back to retention of last year’s players and the portal guys December, January, we went into that operating under this cap,” Kiffin said. “Because we were told the settlement was most likely going to get approved and how that would work.”
Yet the atmosphere Kiffin and his coaches have developed in Oxford might be the key to keeping his players in Oxford.
“I think that’s really helped us over time for us not to have many kids that are playing, leave and go into the portal and for other kids to come to us because they know that,” Kiffin said.
He also believes the continuity of the Ole Miss program helps.
“And a lot of that is to our culture and staff,” Kiffin said. “So to be able to keep our entire staff from last year was very critical. That’s not been the case a lot of times in our years at Ole Miss. We had to replace a lot of really good coaches. I think we’ve done a good job of putting together this roster, working within this cap.”
So has Kiffin found the secret of how to navigate where college football is headed in the future? After 21 wins in the last two seasons, it appears he definitely knows how to adapt and what it takes to be successful.
Steve Barnes
Steve Barnes joins The Rebel Walk staff as a senior writer and brings a trifecta of journalistic experience. As a writer, he has covered college sports for Rivals.com, Football.com and SaturdayDownSouth.com as well as served as a beat writer for various traditional newspapers.
He has been a broadcaster for arena football and several national tournament events for the National Junior College Athletic Association as well as hosting various shows on radio.
A former sports information director at Albany (Ga.) State University and an assistant at Troy and West Florida, he has helped host many NCAA conference, regional and national events, including serving five years on the media committee of the NCAA Division II World Series.
Barnes, a native of Pensacola, Fla., attended Ole Miss in 1983-84, where his first journalism teacher was David Kellum. The duo has come a long way since that time.
He will bring a proven journalistic track record, along with a knack for finding the out-of-the-ordinary story angles to The Rebel Walk.
Barnes continues to reside in Pensacola a mere ten minutes from the beach because he does have taste and a brain.
