Lane Kiffin compares college, professional sports in rant about NIL, transfer portal

Lane Kiffin started off the final day of SEC Media Days with a bang on Thursday, launching into a minutes-long rant about the current state of NIL and the transfer portal.

Suffice it to say he’s not a fan of the current iteration of the rules.

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

“With NIL you’ve got a lot of pay for play going on, and that is what it is. So those two things combining, there just is not a system in place and I don’t think that there’s any other sports at any level that are like this that really you, every year, can opt into free agency. Really twice a year.”

The two transfer portal windows are something many coaches have railed on, particularly because of the length of the windows. The NCAA is moving to trim those windows down.

Still, that players can simply opt to use free transfers in college football is a very different concept from most sports leagues.

“I was just thinking on the plane ride over here, what if you had that in other sports?” Kiffin said. “Tom Brady, Aja Wilson, Lionel Messi, LeBron James. What if every year those guys can opt into free agency, twice a year really, and they’ve got no long-term contracts? Basically everybody’s not even on a one-month contract because they can leave in two windows.

“It’s just created a lot of issues. … And I’m not complaining about it because we take advantage obviously of free agency, but at the same time I don’t think that’s really good for college football. These massive overhauls of rosters every year really is not in the best interest of college football.”

All of that is before you ever even get to the NIL issues the transfer portal has helped exacerbate.

With NIL, schools are effectively able to entice players based on how much money they have to offer. It’s an unregulated market to lure players in, essentially.

“When you add the NIL at the same time, we’ve created — I’ve said it before — we’ve got different caps and no luxury tax system,” Kiffin said. “Now we’ve got professional sports because that really is what we are, what’s been created now. There’s no caps on what guys can make or what teams’ payrolls are, so when this first came out said basically, ‘Whatever programs have the most aggressive boosters with the most money are going to get the players.'”

On top of that, there’s virtually no uniformity in how different states allow NIL to happen. Each state has put in its own laws relating to NIL, some of which circumvent NCAA rules entirely.

States that don’t have such lax rules might put their programs at a disadvantage when it comes to NIL and the transfer portal.

“Now we’re adding some states that now you don’t have to follow the NCAA and now the university can take their money and give it to the collective to give to the players,” Kiffin said. “So now we really have pay for play that the biggest schools with the most donors, the most aggressive and the school wants to spend the most money paying the players for play to come to their school is where we’re at.

“So that’s kind of the state of the union on what all coaches are dealing with around the country, and really a poor system that isn’t getting better now, it’s going to get worse because now we’re just… look at recruiting rankings and you’re going to see that they’re usually going to follow the donor base and what schools are going to decide to give the most money to the players. It is what it is, we’ll deal with it like we deal with everything else, but somehow it’s got to get fixed because there’s no system around it.”

Kiffin doesn’t necessarily have answers, though.

“It’s like our staff, I don’t like you to tell me the problems and not the solutions,” Kiffin said. “I feel like that in this one, I don’t have the exact solution because it is so complicated. And the commissioner, who’s much more educated than I on these things, because I used to say they should be employees so they can have real contracts so when they come you can sign somebody to a two-, three-, four-year contract. But there’s way more issues. That solves one problem and he said but then it opens five, 10 more when they’re actually employees of the university. I don’t have the exact answers.”

Eventually NIL and the transfer portal are likely to have further restrictions that level the playing field across the board. Until then, though, Kiffin understands why any player would take advantage of the current system.

In fact, he’s even encouraged parents of players to do so.

“I like the players get paid but there’s no other system like it,” Kiffin said. “The player, I’ve told our players, I’ve told our parents of our significant players, it is a great time to be a kid or a parent, OK, with where college football is. I’m like they’ll probably eventually fix this, so you will be this one window of a couple years where you can leverage your program every window or you can go into free agency and find the most money out there.

“Now we’re seeing you really get paid three times if you want to. You can get paid to come out of high school, you can one-time transfer, go in, get paid the most money again, then you can grad transfer and get paid again. Eventually you’re not going to be able to do that, I would think, and have that leverage basically every semester to do that. So I’ve told them, it’s an awesome time for them.”