Lane Kiffin explains why Ole Miss has been so effective in the transfer portal

As Ole Miss wrapped up spring football on Saturday with its annual Grove Bowl, head coach Lane Kiffin was already starting to think about the NCAA transfer portal again.

The 15-day spring window for players to enter the transfer portal and obtain a free one-time transfer began on Saturday.

Kiffin, an early adopter of the NCAA transfer portal, plans to use it again. He loves to create competition at every position group, so any players that can beef up a room he will think about trying to entice to come to Ole Miss.

There’s a lot that goes into selling a player out of the transfer portal.

“I think the portal, much like free agents in professional sports, they look at the immediate,” Kiffin said. “I may be signing a one- or two-year contract in free agency, I’m not looking at being there four to five years. So you may look at it differently.

“I’m not saying what places are better, but you may look at, ‘Hey, it’s a lot more important how do I get featured in the offense or defense I play in?’ vs. ‘Where do I live? How close am I to my family to come to games?'”

As things currently stand, Ole Miss currently ranks third nationally in the On3 Team Transfer Portal Index, which measures a team’s change in overall team talent based on transfers in and out.

“I think we’ve had a lot of success because kids have looked at ‘I’m going to play for that staff, this is how I fit in their offensive, defensive system,’ and a lot of these guys that you look at, they were guys that weren’t coming to Ole Miss out of high school. They weren’t coming to Ole Miss,” Kiffin said.

“It’s given us an opportunity to get players that we normally wouldn’t have gotten.”

Among the high-profile transfers that Ole Miss has landed recently are Oklahoma State quarterback Spencer Sanders, LSU quarterback Walker Howard, Texas A&M receiver Chris Marshall and Louisville linebacker Monty Montgomery.

Kiffin explained that he was a step ahead on how useful the transfer portal can be.

He expects competition to be much more fierce now that other coaches and other programs are understanding just how useful the transfer portal is.

“I think that, like I said, it’s been very good for the transfers and the timing of things to help us,” Kiffin said. “I kind of look at it a year ago in free agency, that people hadn’t figured that out yet as much. And I said, ‘OK, they’re going to figure it out more.’ You had some programs a year ago that were not interested in taking transfers, even some famous head coaches had said, ‘Hey, we’re not doing that. We’re not going to take any portal guys because of the locker room’ or whatever some of those coaches’ reasons were.

“I predicted that those guys would change, and now I think everybody is taking guys. It’s much more competitive now. A competitive marketplace for portal guys now.”