Midseason coaching moves like Lane Kiffin's show the structural chaos of college football

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Lane Kiffin's midseason move to LSU has more to do with wider CFB system chaos than him

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Earlier this year, I wrote a piece for premium subscribers on why "Big 4" (NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL) sports discussion is flawed from a business and ratings sense, with Division I college football often outdrawing each of those sports aside from the NFL. But where the "Big 4" can be relevant as a category is that those are professional sports leagues with around the same number of teams that conduct many of their operations (draft, regular season, playoffs) in a similar way. College football remains dramatically different in some key respects, and the latest example of that comes from Lane Kiffin's midseason move from Ole Miss to LSU. Many pundits, from Paul Finebaum to Rece Davis, have been going off on Kiffin for that choice, but it has a lot more to do with how CFB is currently set up than with anything about him.

Kiffin made that move Sunday after weeks of drama, and after his Rebels beat Mississippi State 38-19 in the Egg Bowl Friday. That improved them to 11-1 on the season. They're currently ranked fifth in the coaches' poll, sixth in the AP poll, and seventh in the College Football Playoff rankings. They're not playing in the SEC title game (that's deserving of a side note later), but they look set for a CFP slot. But now, their coach has left for another team in the same conference, leading to them promoting defensive coordinator Pete Golding to the permanent head coaching role.

Coaches sometimes change teams in professional sports as well, of course. But that most frequently comes when their contracts expire, and while there are occasional coaching trades (like the famous one with Bill Belichick), even those tend to come in the offseason. And leagues have often been quite successful at getting teams to delay finalizing particular coaching moves involving people on teams still playing until after those teams' seasons wrap up; the NFL is particularly good at this, offering very limited windows for under-contract interviews while teams are still in the postseason.

The other thing in many pro leagues is that it's rare to see a head coach leave for another head coaching job. While pro teams aren't really as fully "equal" as the league setups envision due to various factors (perhaps most especially, where free agents want to play), that's not really about their resources in salary-capped leagues. (It's somewhat the case in uncapped MLB and the luxury tax areas of the NBA, but even there, there aren't many lateral HC-to-HC moves.) There are sometimes incentives for a coach to switch to a different team, such as more authority over personnel (with a GM or president role) or just more money, but it's much more unusual to see that in the pros than in college, where head coaches leaving for other jobs is a recurring theme each year. And that's about the wide disparities and largely-unstructured nature of college football.

The CFB resource disparities are obvious when it comes to Power 4 and Group of Five schools, with the former getting massively more money from TV deals alone. And even within the Power 4, there's a "Power 2" of the SEC and Big Ten, with those conferences dominating the TV money (and also usually the various rankings). But even within conferences, where the TV money is theoretically equal (not always; after lawsuits and attempts to leave, the ACC struck an unusual deal to favor its most-popular teams), the overall resources aren't thanks to ticket sales, corporate sponsorships, boosters, facilities situations, and more.

For example, former LSU head coach Brian Kelly said in August the school's rostered players were set to get around $18 million this year. That comes from a combination of straight-up athletic department revenue sharing, which kicked in this year and is capped at $20.5 million annually, and donor-backed name, image, and likeness deals. The Ole Miss numbers aren't as clear (thanks in part to them declining newspaper records requests), but the school itself admitted it was poor compared to much of the rest of the conference in a January statement on the approval of revenue sharing:

Thus, while the eye-popping numbers in Kiffin's new contract (seven years, $91 million, putting him with Georgia's Kirby Smart as the only two current coaches making $13 million or more a year) are part of the disparity, they're not all of it. With a higher player budget and a history of recent success (four claimed national titles, in 1958, 2003, 2007, and 2019, versus the Rebels' three from 1959, 1960, and 1962), it's not hard to argue the Tigers seemingly offer a coach the greater chance at winning a national title in any given year.

The midseason move, with a potential CFP run still ahead for the Rebels, has sparked a lot of criticism for Kiffin. And that's somewhat understandable. While Kiffin told ESPN's Marty Smith in an interview Sunday before leaving Oxford that he had wanted to coach the Rebels through the playoff, it makes full sense for Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter not to allow that and to instead move on to Golding. Kiffin will have a lot of work to do at LSU, from putting together a staff to keeping current recruits and bringing in new ones, and it's certainly reasonable to think that he might not be able to fully balance that with playing out the string with Ole Miss.

But the fault for this situation doesn't seem so much with Kiffin (although he is making an affirmative choice to leave, it's for a spot with more resources, and a job that would not still be open after the season) as with the chaotic CFB system that not only allows, but encourages, in-season coach-poaching. And part of what's remarkable about this one is that it's not from a G5 school to a P4 one (as Kiffin previously did from Florida Atlantic to Ole Miss), or even from one P4 school to another in a different conference (as Kiffin did from Tennessee to USC), but within the same conference (and even what used to be the same division before the SEC abolished those). But that makes full sense when you look at the resources at each school: to modify George Orwell, all SEC members are equal, but some SEC members are more equal than others.

The larger thing that makes this unusual relative to pro sports is the midseason timing. But that's a function of the respective structures; pro sports franchises are in competition with each other, but they're ruled over by a league office that often puts some restrictions on that competition (such as with if and when you can interview and/or hire under-contract coaches). In college sports, the key component is the schools, with conference and even national (NCAA) offices holding much less power and thus less able to impose restrictions. And with college teams able to freely sign players rather than going through a draft process, it's much more urgent for them to begin new coaching regimes as early as possible. That regularly leads to situations like the Kiffin one, with his mostly unusual just by being within a conference and with him leaving a playoff-bound team.

While midseason coaching moves are awkward, and certainly provoke a lot of columnist and talking-head scorn, everyone here looks to be acting pretty rationally relative to their incentives. Kiffin is taking a job that would not still be available after the season, and is getting both a pay bump and more resources in the process. (That doesn't mean he'll be more successful at LSU; Kelly's tenure showed that resources and big-name hires aren't everything. But it's a situation where he's set up to succeed.) Meanwhile, Ole Miss AD Carter is preventing divided loyalties by denying Kiffin's request to coach out the season and instead moving on to Golding. It leads to an awkward situation where it's clear that even a school from a Power 2 conference that's headed to the playoff is still in an undesirable situation relative to some of its conference mates, but that's the reality of college football at the moment, and the incentives are aligned for schools to make coaching switches as early as possible and coaches to upgrade the school they're working for at every possible opportunity. And that's likely to continue to be the case in this very decentralized and unequal sport. It doesn't make college football worse than those pro leagues, but it does make it different, and it means that we do see more odd midseason situations like this.

*Side note on the SEC championship game: that will feature a lesser-ranked AP team in No. 10 Alabama against No. 3 Georgia. 10-2 Alabama beat out the Rebels and No. 7 Texas A&M, who were both 11-1 overall but also 7-1 in conference play. They did so thanks to the conference's fourth tiebreaker, cumulative conference winning percentage of all conference opponents of the tied teams. Vanderbilt beating Kentucky last week secured that for the Tide. The separate conferences' differing tiebreakers, which are coming into play more and more frequently in the current megaconference era, are another example of the strangeness of college football relative to those pro sports.

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