Lane Kiffin followed Nick Saban’s footsteps, trading the postseason for LSU.
College football calendar not to blame for Lane Kiffin taking LSU job, not coaching Ole Miss in playoff.
Nick Saban left Michigan State for LSU. Would have have stayed with Spartans if 12-team playoff existed? Hmm.
BATON ROUGE, LA – Imagine a college sports world in which the transfer portal didn’t exist and national signing day didn’t occur until after the season.
Now, imagine LSU had a coaching vacancy in that world.
When would LSU make the hire? Would LSU wait until after the season, and would its top target wait to accept?
We know that wouldn’t happen, because we’ve lived in the world I asked you to imagine. We saw what happened.
In 1999, the college football calendar looked much different. The transfer portal didn’t exist. Neither did a December signing period. The lone signing period occurred in February, after the season.
And what happened in 1999?
Well, on Nov. 30 that year, LSU announced it had poached a gentleman named Nicholas Lou Saban Jr. from Michigan State to be its coach.
This fella named Saban — have you heard of him? — accepted the job, quit on his 10th-ranked Michigan State team, and vamoosed to Baton Rouge before the postseason.
“I mean, what about the bowl game?” one Michigan State student said to ESPN after Saban’s exit.
Pfft. You think Saban cared about the Citrus Bowl? He had a better job on the line. Adios!
Fast-forward 26 years to the day, and LSU hired a gentleman named Lane Kiffin on Nov. 30. Heard of him?
Kiffin, like his mentor Saban before him, hopped on a plane instead of staying put and coaching in the postseason.
So, when Saban and Kiffin blame the college football calendar for this situation of a coach bolting for a new job rather than staying put and coaching in the postseason, you must realize they’re absolutely full of it.
Only a sheep would believe the GOAT that the calendar is responsible and that some magical coaching carousel ethics would leap out of the weeds, if only the portal dates got shifted and the signing period got bumped back.
If the calendar was constructed differently, do you know when the Tigers would have hired Kiffin to replace Brian Kelly, whom LSU fired on Oct. 26?
“I would anticipate they would be making the hire in virtually this exact same time frame,” said one Power Four athletic director, granted anonymity to speak on the realities of the hiring cycle. “I do agree the calendar is a problem, but, even with a change, it wouldn’t impact the hiring time frame.”
Bingo.
We can debate the pros and cons of a December signing period or whether shifting the portal from January to May would be a good idea.
But, don’t kid yourself that making any of those changes would have stopped LSU from hiring Kiffin ASAP or stopped Kiffin from choosing the Tigers instead of Ole Miss and the playoff.
Don’t let yourself be distracted by Saban trying to provide Kiffin some cover by blaming this on the mean, mean calendar that coaches and their bosses helped create.
“We shouldn’t have an early signing date that conflicts with people wanting to hire an early coach, a portal situation where you’ve got to hire an early coach, fire your coach early,” Saban said recently on ESPN, while ignoring his history of leaving Michigan State for LSU in November.
“So, if we did all that in May, … we wouldn’t have all these issues.”
You’ve got to be kidding me, right? I’d like to meet this magical genie who will suddenly appear and solve college football’s bankruptcy of ethics, if only the portal window and signing period shifted to May.
Other pundits parroted Saban’s messaging faulting the calendar. Kiffin latched onto the propaganda, too.
“It’s a bad scheduling system of how it’s set up,” Kiffin said at his LSU introduction.
Do you really believe if the calendar was different, LSU would have let interim coach Frank Wilson ply his trade for three months while waiting until after the season to hire Kiffin, and risk someone else swooping in first?
Not a chance.
You could change the calendar, and sure as the sun rises on the Bayou, schools would keep trying to hire their next coach as swiftly as possible after firing their last coach, even if it means trampling on Michigan State’s 1999 bowl team or Mississippi’s playoff squad.
The Spartans, by the way, won the Citrus Bowl without Saban.
Just in case Kiffin was wondering.
The real change inside college football since Saban’s heel turn is not the calendar, but rather the creation of a 12-team College Football Playoff.
Coaches used to accept new jobs and skip out on bowls. Now, Kiffin has become the first coach to swap the playoff for a step up the perceived food chain.
If the 12-team playoff had been in place in 1999, I wonder whether Kiffin would be making this history. Or, would history of a playoff-skipping coach already have been made?
The 1999 Spartans would have qualified for a 12-team playoff, and when Saban boarded a plane bound for LSU, he would’ve been fast at work engineering a scapegoat to blame for the predicament his ego and ambitions created.
Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network’s senior national college football columnist. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer.
