Players will likely have just one transfer period open to them next season. (Vicky Graff Photo)
Kentucky football fans seldom agree with Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin and plenty of fans — and coaches — find him controversial and maybe even a bit arrogant.
However, Kiffin went on a mini-rant about the football transfer portal this week and I like what he had to say about the transfer portal moving to just one window. “I’ve said this before. There are two views. I usually give you the view that’s best for college football. It’s not necessarily what’s best for Ole Miss,” Kiffin said at his press conference. “What would really be best for college football would be one transfer period and real contracts.”
Multiple transfer portal openings force coaches to recruit every day and it also makes it hard to stabilize a roster. “Nobody should think it’s good that you go to play a player at his fifth school. What are college student-athletes going to five schools for in five years? Everyone should have the ability to transfer — I understand why people think it’s good — but there’s so much bad to it at that age when you have the ability to leave all the time when things don’t go your way,” the Ole Miss coach.
“You don’t push through anything because they’re not giving me the ball enough, I don’t like how they talk to me. That’s not going to help you in real life. And that’s too much of what’s going on now and it’s not the kids’ fault. It’s the setup.”
The consensus seems to be that college football will have one 30-day transfer portal after the season ends — and that’s it.
“I’m more on the part where you just continue to set up for young people that you can just keep leaving at times, no penalty to it, just because you don’t like how things are going,” Kiffin said. “That certainly doesn’t help their transfer of academic units. Nobody even thinks about that anymore.”
Kiffin joked that he remembers when parents used to ask about academics and graduation plans for their son. Those days are mainly gone.
“It’s, ‘What’s he going to get paid?’ Is that really good so when those kids don’t graduate and they have a little more money and then it’s all gone and they don’t have a degree, did we really help them with the system?” Kiffin said.
3 Responses
NIL and the transfer portal are out of control. NIL should be limited to $20,000 per player per year. Teams should not be bidding for players. Kids make the same thing at school A as they do at school B.
One transfer should be allowed with no penalties after their freshman year. A second transfer would be allowed after their sophomore year. They can play immediately but receive no NIL money. A third transfer could be allowed after their junior year, but this would be the last. They sit out a year and receive no NIL money even after the sitout year.
Kids should be required to keep a minimum 2.0 GPA and be on track for graduation to receive NIL or be allowed to transfer. It's time to put student back in student athlete. Why the braintrust at the NCAA could not have come up with that escapes me…oh, that's right, they are a bunch of dumbass Hoosiers.
I agree with Barry that college sports owe it to all fans and their sports to get this fixed now.
The suggestions Barry makes seem reasonable to me. Why is this so difficult for the power that be?
I like Lane Kiffin.
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