Lane Kiffin unloads at SEC media days on NIL, transfer portal issues, ‘legalized cheating’

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Lane Kiffin has never been afraid to be interesting, or controversial, and he kept it up when it was his time to speak Thursday at SEC media days: The Ole Miss coach offered unprompted, unfiltered thoughts on “legalized cheating,” “pay for play” and how name, image and likeness rights have transformed college football into a “disaster that we’re in.”

Kiffin has been outspoken about these issues, and he prefaced his remarks Thursday by saying he had no problem with the players being paid. The main source of his discontent was the ability to transfer right away being leveraged along with NIL rights, with very little system in place to govern it.

“I mean, I was just thinking on the plane ride over here: What if you had that in other sports?” Kiffin said. “Tom Brady, A’ja Wilson, Lionel Messi, LeBron James, what if every year those guys can opt to free agency, twice a year, really, and they have no long-term contracts?”

Kiffin is set to make $7.35 million this year. He has been a head coach at four different college programs as well as the NFL, earning millions in the process. When he was Tennessee’s coach in 2009, he left after one season to take the same job at Southern California. This year his Ole Miss team will have 40 new scholarship players, counting high school recruits and transfers.

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“I’m not complaining about it, because we’ve taken advantage of it,” Kiffin said. “But I don’t think that’s really good for college football. These massive overhauls of rosters every year, that’s not really good for college football. Then when you have NIL at the same time, we’ve created instead of a (floor), we’ve got different caps and no luxury taxes. So now we’ve got professional sports, that’s really what we are, what’s been created now, and there’s no caps on what guys can make and what team’s payrolls are.”

Kiffin said players essentially could leverage their “free agency” three times in their career: as a high school recruit, as a first-time transfer and as a grad transfer. Like many in college athletics, Kiffin is hoping for that to be limited.

“Eventually you’re not going to be able to do that, I don’t think,” Kiffin said. “I’ve told them, it’s an awesome time for them.”

College administrators have been lobbying Congress for a federal bill, and a bipartisan Senate plan was put up for discussion on Thursday morning, just before Kiffin spoke. But it remains unclear whether something tangible will be done.

Kiffin in the past has advocated for making athletes employees and signing them to contracts. But he has backed off that since SEC commissioner Greg Sankey spoke to him about the “other issues that creates,” as Kiffin put it. He was also skeptical of revenue sharing with athletes because it would still be outweighed by what’s going on with NIL payments.

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“I’ve always said that I think it’s phenomenal that players get a chance to get paid, which is great,” he said. “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.”

Of course, the reason there’s no system in place is that the NCAA resisted NIL rights for years and didn’t relent until it kept losing in court and state legislatures passed laws. The expansion of NIL rights kicked in two summers ago, just after the NCAA also relented on transfer rules, allowing players a one-time exemption to transfer and play immediately, in addition to the graduate transfer exemption.

Since then, coaches and others have belabored what they’ve seen as players taking NIL deals to transfer, or having it drive their decision on where to go out of high school. Kiffin said he foresaw that years ago.

“We have this NIL, it’s great, and this portal, it’s great. Whoa. And I’m not saying I was the only one saying it. 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,” he said. “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.”

Kiffin pointed to what he said are the dynamics created: Offseason workouts where players are getting pushed by strength coaches while hearing from other schools about transferring. He described players wondering about what teammates were earning while playing less.

“Again, not a good setup,” he said.

As open as he was on that, Kiffin did clam up somewhat on Thursday. Even then, he managed to be quotable. Such as when he was asked how Ole Miss boosters would rank in their commitment.

“I am not about to start putting rankings out on boosters from top to bottom in the conference,” Kiffin answered, smiling. “God, I want to so bad, though.”

He also demurred when asked about the recent revelations about Tennessee, which fired Jeremy Pruitt amid NCAA violations that included paying players. It was the first question Kiffin got on Thursday.

“Well, that didn’t take long,” Kiffin said, drawing a laugh from the room. “I’ve got a lot of thoughts on that case, the case at USC, the case at Tennessee, all of that. I’m not going to get into any of that. We’re here to talk about the Ole Miss team.”

And yet Kiffin received very few questions about his team. Instead, his session was dominated by, as he called it, “the state of the union on what all coaches are dealing with around the country.”

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(Photo: Justin Ford / Getty Images)