Lane Kiffin’s awkward and angst-filled departure from Ole Miss will happen again.
It’s inevitable unless college administrators and football coaches agree to reimagine an imperfect calendar that has been a mess for decades.
Under the current format, national signing day happens during conference championship week, the transfer portal opens during the College Football Playoff and some coaches are secretly interviewing for other jobs before Halloween.
Clunky and clumsy at best. Chaotic and conflicted might be more accurate.
No one has an ideal solution. Even the thought of adopting an NFL-like format seems flawed.
“You want the best idea? Blow it up and start from scratch,” UNLV coach Dan Mullen said. “It’s a shame you’re going to lose a lot of things that are great in college football, but you already have.”
Three Southeastern Conference programs — Florida, LSU and Ole Miss — courted Kiffin for weeks before he finally picked the Tigers and left the other two fanbases in emotional shambles. The Gators pivoted to Tulane coach Jon Sumrall; the Rebels stayed in-house and promoted defensive coordinator Pete Golding.
Florida and Ole Miss were left trying to convince themselves they’re better off without Kiffin. Anyone who has witnessed his messy exits from basically every job he's held might not have needed much convincing.
But the real villain is a college football calendar that essentially forces teams to scramble to get coaches in place before signing day for high school recruits, which was moved last year from the third to the first Wednesday in December.
Even in an era of the quick fix through the transfer portal, football teams need high school athletes to build out rosters. What happens when things go bad? Take a look at Penn State, which fired its coach in October but has yet to hire a replacement. The Nittany Lions have lost dozens of commitments in recent days, have locked down just a handful of signees, all of which has prominent boosters demanding answers.
While Kiffin left right away, some others finish out the season at their ‘old’ jobs
A handful of Power Four schools hired Group of Five head coaches and allowed them to remain in place even though it made for a trickier signing day.
Kiffin, meanwhile, wanted to coach the Rebels through the CFP but was told no thanks; Ole Miss officials surely didn’t want him having daily contact with players who could follow him to Baton Rouge.
“Somebody’s got to get all this stuff under control,” said new Oklahoma State coach Eric Morris, who is remaining with North Texas through the season. “Just makes no sense at any level that we’re sitting here talking about people that are going to be in the College Football Playoff, a team and their coach isn’t going to be there to help them get through the whole entire season.
“It’s not sustainable. There are so many things that are not sustainable right now in what we’re doing.”
Signing day a moving target for decades
Since the early 1980s, the much-anticipated — often overhyped — signing day had been in early February. It seemed perfectly placed, set weeks after the last bowl games had been played and a national champion had been crowned.
But coaches grew tired of having to continuously court high school kids during the football season and wanted a chance to lock them up long before February. In response, the NCAA delivered an early signing period in 2017.
That worked well for a while. But with the CFP expanding the postseason and stretching games well into January, the early signing period started to muddy the calendar.
It prompts ADs to fire struggling coaches in the middle of the season to get a jump on their search for a replacement, and the transfer portal made roster management even messier.
“It’s a game of musical chairs, and we all know what happens to the guy who doesn’t get a seat,” Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin said.
Stricklin has a solution, or at least a working theory of something that might work. His idea includes eliminating spring practice, moving signing day back to February, opening the transfer portal between March and April, and mandating that only players who were with a team last season can take part in offseason conditioning programs. And then newcomers would be allowed to join for summer workouts that would include the 15 practices normally held in the spring.
“Coaches don’t want to hear that because they think, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve got to have eight months before I kick the ball off with these kids,’” Stricklin said. … “The football schedules combined with the semester structure, and the idea that everybody wants their teams put together in January, unless we fix that, it’s never going to work.”
Texas Tech coach Joey McGuire had a different suggestion. He wants to start the season a week earlier than usual, play conference title games over Thanksgiving weekend and play postseason games every seven days.
“You could play the national championship on January 1st and then the portal would open on January 2nd, so the season would actually be over,” he said. “Until you do that, we’re still going to have this."
Would an NFL-style calendar be the best solution?
There has been rampant talk about college football adopting an NFL-style calendar, which would mean coaching movement after the season in January and February, player movement in March and then team workouts after. And there are penalties for tampering with coaches and players under contract.
McGuire said colleges should consider something similar. He offered that teams who hire coaches who leave other teams in the middle of a playoff run — much like Kiffin did at Ole Miss — would be ineligible for the CFP the following year. He added that those coaches making a jump would not be allowed to bring players with them.
“They can get in the transfer portal, but they’ve got to go somewhere else; they can’t follow you,” he said. “Until there’s some penalties in that, we’re going to get the same thing over and over.”
And it will lead to more Kiffin-like exits and fanbase excitability.
“Does anybody have a perfect solution? No,” Mullen said. “Here’s why: There are 136 Division I teams. There’s a lot of different conferences. Every one of those 136 teams operates on a different schedule. I know it’s like, ‘Hey, let’s look at a pro model.’"
Maybe the biggest problem with the pro model is that, even though college sports look more like the pros every day, there is still school — and a school calendar — involved.
“Then let’s go to every president and every chancellor and say, ‘If you’re a Division I school, classes start on this day and end on that day.’ That’s a way to fix it because then you can really set the calendar. But it’s hard when some people are on quarters, some people are on trimester, some are on semester. … When everybody’s working on a different calendar, it’s hard to come up with the exact thing.”
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AP Sports Writers Mark Anderson in Las Vegas, Cliff Brunt in Oklahoma City, Stephen Hawkins in Dallas, Charles Odum in Atlanta and Teresa Walker in Nashville, Tennessee, contributed.
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