Before we get started, let’s do a quick breakdown of the College Football Playoff bubble:
Vanderbilt: My precious little angels who belong in the College Football Playoff.
Miami: Non-precious non-angels who do not belong in the College Football Playoff.
Notre Dame: Somehow in the Playoff over the Miami team they lost to because things always work out for them.
BYU: I will get an incurable ick if they lose twice to Texas Tech.
Texas: Should have beaten 4-8 Florida.
– Rodger Sherman
The Lane Train is delayed
The long wait on Lane is almost over. After weeks of speculation, the Ole Miss coach reportedly set a deadline of Saturday to decide what school he wants to coach next year. Then Saturday came and went. Late Saturday night, ESPN reported that Kiffin had called a meeting with his team for Sunday morning, and that he would be leaving Ole Miss for LSU. Then Sunday morning, that meeting was moved to later in the day. What is this, the conclave from the movie Conclave?!?!?!? In the time Kiffin deliberated, Arkansas, Auburn, and Florida all announced their head coaching titles.
At time of publication, ESPN is reporting that Lane is, in fact, geaux-ing to LSU; Yahoo has reported that Kiffin “has made clear” he is leaving.
I get it: LSU is special. It’s literally my favorite College Football Place. (I wrote about it in the newspaper!) If I was tailgating in The Grove and I got a call to go tailgate in Baton Rouge instead, I’d probably go through the same extended deliberation process as Kiffin.
But man. Everything about these past weeks has been exactly what bothers me about college football, my favorite sport in the world. Let me vent:
You’re leaving exactly what you want to chase.
Ole Miss is currently ranked 7th in the country after going 11-1. The team is a lock for the College Football Playoff and will likely host a first round playoff game in front of a wild crowd in Oxford. Maybe it’s overly optimistic to say the Rebels can win the national title … but they’ve got a shot. This has been one of the best seasons in Ole Miss history. (Technically, its best season since 1963. The story of why Ole Miss suddenly stopped being a competitive SEC team in the mid-1960s is a story for another time … but you can probably figure it out.)
Isn’t this the whole point of being a head coach? To have a moment like this? To have a chance to win a national championship?
The situation feels like Peter Griffin passing up the boat for the mystery box. At LSU, Lane Kiffin could do anything! He could even coach a team to the College Football Playoff!
Kiffin seemingly senses the mistake he’s making. He reportedly pushed for a best-of-both-worlds scenario, in which he leaves for LSU but also finishes out the season in charge of Ole Miss. He wants to have King Cake and eat it too. Kiffin should know better than anybody that his ask is untenable. Nick Saban famously fired him before the national championship game for being too much of a distraction while he tried to do double duty as Alabama’s offensive coordinator and FAU’s new head coach.
Perhaps Kiffin is worried that if he stays at Ole Miss and falls short of a natty, he’ll never get the chance again? Bro, you are literally Lane Kiffin. You have pissed away the chance of a lifetime approximately 3.5 times in your career, only to wind up here, 50 and flirty and thriving, because you’re a hell of a ball coach. You’re at the 1-yard line. Go for it!
Side note: Could you imagine if a player pulled this before the Playoff? They’d have to pull every call-in radio show in America off the air.
We’ve gotta stop treating coaches like this.
LSU is a case study in how much we overvalue college football coaches. The Tigers won national championships with three different, consecutive head coaches — first Nick Saban, then Les Miles, then Ed Orgeron. That is to say, they won with a genius, a guy who ate grass, and a horny swamp man, respectively. Orgeron, who coached one of the most perfect teams in college football history six years ago, is more or less publicly begging anybody — ANYBODY — to give him a coaching job … and failing.
LSU then gave Brian Kelly a $95 million contract, thinking that a more buttoned up head coach would surely take the team to greater heights than Coach O could. That logic backfired as aggressively as anything can backfire, and just four years into Kelly’s tenure, the school decided to eat his entire remaining contract.
Now, they are reportedly trying to give Kiffin a $100 million coaching contract. Maybe it’ll work — he’s a great coach and LSU is a great program. But considering everything we know about LSU and college football today, how is their takeaway that they need to spend more on a coach?
In 2025, big-ticket coaching hires failed all over the map. Look at the USA Today coaching salary database: Just four of the Top 15 salaries went to coaches who got their teams to the Playoff this year. Five of the Top 15 were coaches who either had losing records or were so bad that they got fired mid-season. (Hey LSU, look! It’s you!)
I suspect that those failures are due to the massive shift in how college football works. You can just pay the players now. You don’t need to hire a Coach God. You just need to pay good players to play for your football team. The schools paying $10 million to coaches are losing time after time to schools paying $5 million to coaches and passing the savings onto better players.
Remember: LSU lost the top QB recruit in the country in 2024, who was lured away by a deal at Michigan that reportedly pays him $2.5 million per year. I can’t shake the feeling that LSU should have paid a couple million dollars more for a quarterback instead of $150 million to fire its coach and hire a new one.
Kiffinfest distracted from the best weekend of the year.
This weekend kicked so much ass. I was glued to my TV from noon on Friday to past midnight on Saturday. It was a whirlwind, transporting me across the country from high-stakes thrillers to low-stakes thrillers that fans in the stands treated as if they were high-stakes. It was 48 hours of hate and joy and chaos.
And throughout the whole weekend, we kept cutting back to Oxford for updates on a guy deciding whether he was gonna take a pay raise. “He’s still thinking,” they’d say. “He has moved from his office to his Thinking Chamber,” they’d say. “In Hour 17, Lane has now progressed to Pondering,” they’d say.
Give me a break! I would do anything for a sport where this BS was separated from the good stuff. Am I part of the problem for leading with Lane instead of the awesome football I just hyped up? YES?!?!?! What can I say, I’m an imperfect man.
Now let’s get onto ball.
Sponsored by Homefield Apparel
… hey Lane. We have merch for you.
Lane, I hear you may need some new gear.
Great news! Homefield Apparel has an elite LSU collection that will quickly allow you to establish a rapport with your new fans.
Homefield is also doing a 30 percent off deal with promo code HOMEFIELD30. The deal is so good, even someone who just signed a $100 million contract can’t pass it up!
Maybe be a little bit quicker with your decision-making though … I don’t think that deal’s gonna last forever.
ACC-pocalypse Now, Part 2!
In the very first edition of Sports!, I wrote about a potential college football chaos scenario: That a five-loss Duke team could win the ACC, triggering a College Football Playoff disaster. A month later, I am thrilled to tell you that …
IT …
IS …
HAPPENING!!!!!!!!!!
That’s right! 7-5 Duke is headed to the ACC championship game, thanks to a series of improbable results paired with an arcane set of tiebreakers. The Blue Devils clinched when a coachless Cal team beat SMU to drop the Mustangs into a five-way tie for second-place in the ACC:
Let’s run down this weirdness:
The best team in the ACC is, without much doubt, Miami. The Hurricanes have the league’s best record at 10-2, which is underselling it: They beat Notre Dame, and both of their losses were tight games against quality opponents. They are, by far, the highest-rated team in the league in various computer rankings, as well as the human polls.
However, both of Miami’s losses came in conference play, leaving it at 6-2 in the ACC standings, and tied for second-place with Duke, Georgia Tech, Pitt, and SMU.
The fairest tiebreaker is head-to-head matchups. However, the ACC is too big and the season is too short for it to be effective. The five tied teams have not all played each other. So the ACC went down its list of tiebreakers until it got to #5: Combined record of conference opponents — essentially, strength of schedule.
Duke’s opponents went 32-32 in ACC play; Miami was next-best at 28-34. So Duke wins the tiebreaker over Miami and heads to Charlotte. (This is where we mention that Duke’s head coach, Manny Diaz, was fired by Miami in 2021.)
The most likely scenario moving forward is that Duke loses to Virginia in the ACC Championship Game. The Hoos are also 10-2, and were ranked 18th in last week’s College Football Playoff poll. If they win, they’ll uncontroversially earn a College Football Playoff spot as one of the five highest-ranked conference champions. To repeat: The simple, straightforward scenario involves Virginia, a school that has never won an outright conference championship in 140 years of playing football, making the College Football Playoff.
I am not even getting into the fact that Virginia’s loss to NC State was technically a non-conference game.
If Duke wins, though, the ACC is in trouble. Like I said, the five highest-ranked conference champions get automatic playoff bids. Duke would easily be the worst of the four power conference champions, and would also likely be considered worse than some non-power conference champions — for example: 12-1 James Madison, 11-2 Tulane (which literally beat Duke in September), and 11-2 UNLV. That would leave the ACC out of the Playoff.
The ACC has itself to blame. The reason that the championship game came down to a bad tiebreaker is because of the league’s decision to simultaneously add teams and eliminate divisions. Yes, the ACC Coastal was a subject of mockery for years. But it’s indisputable that a large grouping of teams with wildly varying schedules is more likely to create to awkward ties like this. Miami never even had the chance to play either of the teams that squeezed them out of the title game!
The conference will try to Fix This in the offseason. Meetings will be held. Solutions will be proposed. (A handy suggestion: Use the Mountain West method in which ties are broken by either the team that is higher in the College Football Playoff rankings, or the team that is higher in various computer ratings. That’ll put your best team in, every time!) Perhaps the power conferences will try to renege on the paltry promise they made to smaller leagues of a single guaranteed Playoff spot, now that they’ve seen the potential horror of two teams from those leagues making it in.
But I can’t say I’m confident they’ll fix anything. After all, the reason the ACC (and other leagues) gleefully ditched divisions in recent years was because they thought a division-less 1-vs-2 championship format would put their best teams in the College Football Playoff. They failed to imagine a problem that simple logic could’ve predicted. They made their bed — and, somehow, made me a Duke football fan. Go Blue Devils!
BOOLA BOOLA!
At long last, the Ivy League deigned to send its college football teams to the FCS playoffs this season. It took a few decades, but the snootiest league in sports finally came to the conclusion that letting its football players compete for national championships would not interfere with their refinement as scholars and gentlemen. (Weirdly, this was already OK in every other Ivy League sport.)
At halftime of Saturday’s games, it looked like the Ivy League had made a terrible mistake. Harvard was getting shut out, 31-0, by Villanova, and Yale was getting dominated by Youngstown State, trailing 35-7.
But Yale turned up the heat, and the Penguins couldn’t handle it. (Big problem for penguins, tbh.) The Elis scored the final 29 points of the game to win, 43-42:
(Making it sweeter for Yale: Harvard absolutely did not match their energy, losing 52-7.)
Honestly, don’t sleep on the Ivies. According to Bill Connelly’s SP+ ratings, Yale was the 12th-best team in the FCS this year. He actually had the Bulldogs favored in this matchup. Their quarterback, Dante Reno, was a 3-star recruit who spent one season at South Carolina before transferring to Yale where his father, Tony, is the head coach.
I’ve been bullish on the Ivies’ chances in the FCS playoffs. A few months ago, I recorded a podcast with Ryan Nanni about why the once-dominant Ivies opted out of mainstream college football competition for decades, and why they seem to be opting back in:
Next up for Yale is a game against #2 Montana State in Bozeman, which is probably not going to go well. However, I would like to draw attention to this out-of-nowhere tweet from last year, in which I predicted this specific matchup:
No, I can’t use these powers for good.
🌈 Devastating news from Hawai’i: After self-taught, Japanese-born kicker Kansei Matsuzawa hit his first 25 field goals of the year, tying the NCAA record for most consecutive field goals, the Tokyo Toe missed a chip shot 30-yarder on his final kick of the year.
⚓️ Our hero Diego Pavia completed a 10-win season at Vanderbilt with a 45-23 win over Tennessee, helping the Commodores score the most points they’ve scored against the Vols in 102 years. Between them and Yale, football is all about the nerds now. (Offer does not apply to Northwestern.)
🌰 Ohio State beat Michigan for the first time since 2019. Now this time when the Buckeyes win the national championship, it won’t be weird.
❄️ We had some great Snow Ball yesterday. Here’s defending Division III champion North Central playing in a blizzard.
🗻 My favorite moment of the weekend may have been New Mexico’s victory over San Diego State. The loudest crowd I’ve ever heard in ABQ forced back-to-back-to-back false starts in double OT to help win the game for the Lobos, and then stormed the field:
At the time, it looked like the Lobos had clinched a Mountain West championship berth, but then last year’s UNM coach, Bronco Mendenhall, blew a big lead against Boise State. The title game spot will come down to tiebreakers, which will be decided today.
🙄 Everything about football is FUN and NEW and DIFFERENT … and then there’s Alabama playing Georgia in the SEC championship game like they have for the last 1,000 years.
