Five years and five months ago, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey went in front of Congress to push for federal protections that, to date, still haven’t materialized. It was a fraught moment in college sports: COVID threatening to disrupt the football season; legislative pressure building on colleges to allow athletes to earn money through name, image and likeness; and lawsuits meant to strike directly at the NCAA’s ability to regulate itself on a variety of issues like eligibility and transfers.
“If universities are allowed to pay student-athletes for NIL rights,” Sankey said in his written testimony, “the public will begin to perceive college athletics as a semi-professional sport.”
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Sankey may be the most powerful person in college sports, but he has been very wrong for a very long time about what truly endangers their enterprise. The problem is not the professionalization of college sports but rather the lack of professionalism.
And this time, it’s occurring right under his nose.
The College Football Playoff — the crown-jewel event Sankey and his fellow conference commissioners created to fill their pockets with billions of dollars — will begin in fewer than three weeks.
One of the teams that has unofficially qualified for that playoff by every traditional metric is the University of Mississippi. Lane Kiffin, the coach who led Ole Miss to that 11-1 record and the best regular season in its post-integration history, resigned Sunday to become the head coach at LSU.
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He left after a protracted tug-of-war with administrators at Ole Miss about whether he could coach the team in the playoff while simultaneously leading a historical rival and direct competitor that plays Ole Miss annually. And because Kiffin didn’t get exactly what he wanted — there was simply no way Ole Miss officials could let him coach their team (and potentially recruit their players) for the next month — he did his level best to burn the place to the ground, reportedly issuing ultimatums to his staff that they needed to leave with him immediately or they wouldn’t be welcome in Baton Rouge.
Lane Kiffin leaves Ole Miss in a mess after six seasons at the school. (Petre Thomas-Imagn Images
(IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect / Reuters)
We can have a discussion about the morality of what Kiffin’s doing to a program that helped rehabilitate his obnoxious reputation over the last six years, the inconvenience of the coaching calendar and whether Ole Miss is making a mistake by prioritizing the long-term interests of its program over what’s most likely to help the Rebels win a championship over the next month.
It’s all fair game.
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But the larger problem with what transpired Sunday shouldn’t be up for debate.
Kiffin leaving the No. 7 team in the country to take a job with another SEC program before the sport’s marquee event is bad for the product, and no other well-run sports league would tolerate it.
Yet in all the years of listening to administrators like Sankey fret about the unsustainability of the current model and wring their hands about how fans will react if college athletes got paid like professionals or the harm done to bowl games when players opt out, have you heard even a whisper of concern about what the adults are doing to wreck the legitimacy of their sport?
Why does anyone in college football accept this as a normal cost of doing business when it crushes a fan base, sabotages a team and devalues your playoff?
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This isn’t good for the brand, nor is it great “content.” It’s poison spreading within Sankey’s league, right under his nose while the league’s leadership thinks fans are so addicted to the product that they’ll forever accept any gut punches thrown their way — except, of course, the scourge of paying players what they’re worth.
At some point, the façade crumbles. It always does.
The SEC is a league where a Tennessee coach was once served a subpoena at media days, an Ole Miss coach was fired for calling an escort service on his university phone and an Alabama coach lasted only four months after an unfortunate night at a strip club.
But none of them have done more damage to their profession, the reputation of their conference and the image of the sport than Kiffin walking out on a playoff team and dragging a wrecking ball behind him.
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It’s historic, it’s unfathomable and it’s a disgrace.
While it’s easy to blame “the system” or “the calendar,” as you might have heard on ESPN over the weekend, the water-toting bobbleheads with microphones fail to grasp that this is a story of individual choices and responsibilities.
It’s Kiffin’s choice to leave a trail of sleaze on his way out of town. And it’s the choice of Greg Sankey and other college sports leaders to do nothing about it, to shrug their shoulders and to rail against professionalization of college sports when making it a priority would be the best path for their business.
Instead, lack of action is a strategic choice, and it’s one that needs to be called for what it is: A dereliction of duty in protecting the best interests of college football.
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Don’t you think, during all those years of the New England Patriots winning championships, that other NFL franchises would have liked to break up the dynasty by putting a huge pile of cash in front of Bill Belichick right before a Super Bowl run?
Loyalty wasn’t the reason it never happened. It’s not possible because the NFL understands how bad it would be for its product and has made rules that govern when and under what circumstances coaches can change jobs when they’re under contract.
Without collective bargaining, college sports has often run into legal trouble when trying to regulate anything regarding compensation or movement of personnel.
And yet, every time people like Sankey end up on Capitol Hill begging for some type of NCAA protection legislation, it’s amazing how the focus is always on the chaos of NIL and the transfer portal while the coaching carousel never gets mentioned as a source of harm for the product and schools that pour hundreds of millions of dollars into their programs.
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The chaos left behind by Kiffin’s departure is not just a story that impacts one football team. It’s tens of millions of dollars potentially lost for a flagship state university and a local community if, for instance, the CFP committee penalizes Ole Miss and sends the Rebels on the road in the first round instead of hosting in Oxford.
And the committee would be well within its right to do that. In fact, if we’re being real about it, it should probably have a long conversation in that room about whether Ole Miss should be in the playoff at all.
Is that fair to a team that went 11-1? Absolutely not. But fair has nothing to do with it. After everything that transpired across the past couple weeks and Sunday, how can anyone possibly be confident that Ole Miss will remain a viable entity three weeks from now without Kiffin and perhaps other staff members?
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A coach leaving is, by definition, traumatic and overwhelming. Players start thinking about their own futures and options. Routines get broken up. It would truly defy the odds if Ole Miss was as good of a team under these circumstances as it has been for the past three months.
That’s Kiffin’s fault, and his reputation will pay a price across generations. The circus of the last few weeks will go down in SEC infamy, a forever stain on his already pock-marked record.
But this is also the product of an ecosystem where players changing jobs on a whim or for a paycheck is a crisis that needs to be dealt with immediately and regulated through a literal act of Congress, while coaches getting paid $10 million a year wrecking their own teams gets met with a shoulder shrug.
This might be the first time it’s happened in college football. But in the 12-team playoff era, you can bet it won’t be the last. If the leaders of college sports aren’t willing to make this as much of a priority as opt-outs and portal windows while it turns their national playoff into a punch line, they’ve lost all sense of perspective on what’s good or bad for the game.
