Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin addressed the media Monday about the transfer portal now moving to just one window. The Rebels head coach was adamant about the importance of this cutting down on the constant movement and players careers being negatively affected by it.
“I think that cleans stuff up. 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. “What would really be best for college football would be one transfer period and real contracts.”
The NCAA is finalizing the major change to the transfer portal that could reshape roster management across college sports.
Currently, athletes in football and other sports have two entry periods—one after the regular season and another in the spring.
That system was designed to give players flexibility, but coaches have grown frustrated with the year-round roster instability it creates. Multiple windows mean constant recruiting, constant re-recruiting of current players, and constant roster churn. Kiffin, despite having a ton of success at Ole Miss thanks to the portal, went on quite the rant about its flaws.
“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. 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. Kind of a (Nick) Saban rant there, but to your question, yeah, one’s probably better just to limit that. Once you’re there and in spring ball, you’re not going, ‘Well, I didn’t like how they used me in that Saturday scrimmage. I’m leaving.'”
Advertisement
Sep 6, 2025; Lexington, Kentucky, USA; Mississippi Rebels linebacker TJ Dottery (6) runs off the field after the game against the Kentucky Wildcats at Kroger Field. Jordan Prather-Imagn Images
By consolidating into one portal window, the NCAA aims to create more structure and predictability.
For football, that would likely mean a single 30-day period after the season where athletes can enter the portal and explore transfer opportunities. Programs would gain more clarity in roster construction, allowing coaches to hit the recruiting trail with a firmer sense of their needs.
And for athletes, however, the change is a double-edged sword. They’ll have fewer opportunities to test the market and will need to make quicker decisions. Still, the NCAA believes a single window will reduce chaos, ease strain on staffs, and create a more balanced system for both players and programs.
“That’s OK. People do that in normal professions for bigger salaries. 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.
“We’ve gotten to a place where recruits come here and one of the questions parents always asked, ‘Talk to me about academics. What’s the plan for him to graduate?’ I don’t ever get that question anymore,” Kiffin said. “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?”
Advertisement
window.addEventListener(‘message’, function (event) {if (event.data.totalpoll && event.data.totalpoll.action === ‘resizeHeight’) {document.querySelector(‘#totalpoll-iframe-1536’).height = event.data.totalpoll.value;}}, false);document.querySelector(‘#totalpoll-iframe-1536’).contentWindow.postMessage({totalpoll: {action: ‘requestHeight’}}, ‘*’);
This story was originally reported by A to Z Sports on Sep 9, 2025, where it first appeared in the College Football section. Add A to Z Sports as a Preferred Source by clicking here.