Lane Kiffin reacts to national pushback on his NIL comments

Few have been as outspoken about the current issues surrounding NIL and the NCAA transfer portal as Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin, who has even gotten national pushback thanks to his tone and tenor.

Kiffin has been blunt in assessing that there are some problems with the current iteration of things in college football.

“I mean I’m OK. It is what it is,” Kiffin said of the criticism. “People are going to, when you sit up here and talk for a while, they’re going to take little parts of it and cut down the paragraph or the sentence and then it plays different than you’re saying.”

One of the chief criticisms and main focuses of the national pushback surrounding Kiffin seems to be that he has used the portal and NIL as much as anyone else to secure talent, thus making him a hypocrite of sorts. But is that really accurate?

Or has Kiffin, instead, simply outlined the issues as they stand?

“To be clear, like I mentioned just earlier, it’s a really bad system, like I said,” Kiffin clarified. “I didn’t say all of college football is broke. But I’m talking specifically about two things: portal and NIL and them coming together at the same time together basically a couple years ago and it not being thought out of the issues that come around that.”

It’s hard to argue with that fact pattern. NIL, in particular, seemed to come about with just about no guardrails or rules in place.

Even local state legislatures had to scramble to try to offer clarifying rules for the programs in their state. Ironically, that’s one of the things that has made the system so broken, as Kiffin calls it. There are different rules at just about every school, leading to an uneven playing field in some circumstances.

Then throw on top the unintended consequences of the NCAA transfer portal and the two windows of time where players can enter and where they fall on the calendar and you have a recipe for a lot of strife for college coaches.

National pushback aside, it’s simply a lot to manage right now. Particularly when the rules aren’t always clear.

“At the same time we’re still trying our best to utilize whatever rules there are and I think our collective does a great job,” Kiffin said. “So again, I wasn’t complaining about anything here, I was just talking about the system that’s out there. Walker Jones, our collective, our donors have done a great job.

“There just needs to be a lot of work done on the system that is around it because, like I said, there’s no sport at any level where your players just twice a year can opt into free agency and there’s no way to sign them to longer than that. And again, I’m not complaining about, I never complain about the money they get. It’s just you should be able to have longer contracts.”