Of all the reactions to the Lane Kiffin madness over the weekend, the one I personally found the most bewildering was the notion that Kiffin’s decision to leave Ole Miss on the eve of the College Football Playoff to take a job at LSU somehow “devalued” the Playoff.
The general thought process seems to be that there is now a precedent: A coach can just leave his team on the cusp of a Playoff bid, willy-nilly, and therefore this can happen again, and if this can happen again, it will happen all the time. What’s the point of all this if a coach is just gonna bolt right when the team he was ostensibly leading is about to play for the biggest prize?
There are several problems with this line of thinking, from the fact that this was a particularly unusual set of circumstances (a job opening up at one of a school’s biggest rivals that happens to be one of the most desired jobs in the entire sport) to the human being we are talking about here, Lane Kiffin, a chaos agent whose combination of coaching brilliance and erratic, online-brain personality makes him exactly the sort of person who would actively seek out all this drama in the first place. There is no one else who would so willingly find himself in this situation.
(A side note here: Honestly, don’t we want more Lane Kiffins? You’re telling me you haven’t had an absolute blast watching all these schools lose their minds this year? It’s been fantastic! This madness is downright hypnotic. And that madness requires people like Kiffin, entertaining but fundamentally nihilist guys who are always looking for the next score and thrusting their perpetually smirking face into every camera within eyeshot, at the dead center of the sport. You really want coaches to just sit at the same job being stoic, competent and dull for two decades, grinding out eight-win seasons and giving canned answers to everything? You want this sport to be calmer? Really? Please. Real life has enough Kirk Ferentzes as is. Give me all the maniacs you’ve got. Honestly, I kind of want Lane Kiffin to take a new job every four years. We can make it our new Olympics. Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart can take over for Marty Smith.)
But the primary reason the idea that the Playoff has been diminished by Kiffin’s decision is silly simply requires you to look around. Because it sure seems to be like for most teams, the Playoff is the biggest thing in the world.
Sure, there are a few programs that shrug at a Playoff berth, or at least see reaching the Playoff this year as the baseline of expectations rather than the height of aspirations. Ohio State. Georgia. Alabama. Notre Dame. Maybe Oregon. So five. I guess there are just five.
But that leaves everybody else. Everyone else will be absolutely thrilled to be here.
Indiana was there last year, sure, but in 2025 the Hoosiers and Curt Cignetti have raised the whole ceiling on what seems possible — not just for them but for any team looking for a quick turnaround after decades of moribund irrelevance. Last year felt to many like a schedule-aided fluke. No one’s saying that this time.
Oklahoma made the CFP four times in the first six years of the four-team format but lost its first game all four times and had been spinning its wheels since Lincoln Riley left, including a move to a new conference that, in its first year there, made you wonder if it might be a little bit more middle-of-the-pack in this new era than its fan base, with its vast history, might want to admit. Instead, the Sooners are in the Playoff, and if they end up hosting a game, that place is going to lose its ever-loving mind.
Texas A&M? This is the second season the Aggies have won double-digit games this century. That’s as many times as Illinois has! Sure, that Texas loss hurt, but c’mon: This is as good as it has gotten in College Station for a long, long time. They’re ecstatic, and they should be.
And heck, nobody may be more excited to be in the Playoff — to be hosting a game in the Playoff — than our friends at Ole Miss, which previously was only having its best season in decades but now has the righteous fury of the wronged. How do you not root for Ole Miss right now?
Kiffin may have pushed hard to continue coaching during the Playoff and then head to Baton Rouge, but anyone who doesn’t have a relationship with Kiffin’s agent (and boy, a whole lot of people holding microphones seem to!) could see the obvious conflict, which is why it was particularly infuriating to Ole Miss fans when some of those microphones seemed to try to blame their school for not allowing him to do so — which just provides more righteous anger!
One of the frustrating things (from the outside) about Kiffin’s decision to leave is that there is no real recourse for anyone infuriated by his doing so. The absolute worst-case scenario for him is that things implode in Baton Rouge, in which case he still has $91 million with which to ease the burden on his weary soul. But here’s a way to feel like you’re sticking it to him: By cheering on the scorned lovers he left behind. Ole Miss is about to become America’s Team. It will never be this beloved again.
Meanwhile, coaches and fans of Miami, Texas, Vanderbilt, Alabama, BYU and Utah are going to spend the next week making their case for the Playoff to anyone who will listen, and many who very much would rather not; God forbid you get stuck next to any of these people at a party over the next five days. The Playoff sure doesn’t seem very devalued to them. It looks more like it’s all that they want in the world.
And that’s not even accounting for the teams for which a Playoff berth would be a golden ticket. The winner of North Texas-Tulane is about to have the biggest stage either program has ever had. Their American Conference title game on Friday night has a real chance to be the wildest game of the weekend, with stakes that will feel like the end of the world: If you win, you make the Playoff, but if you lose, you wave goodbye to the coach who got you this far and have to start over, wondering if this opportunity will ever come again.
And while the Gordian Knot that is the ACC has been amusing, and while it does feel a little embarrassing that the labyrinthine league tiebreakers somehow spit out Duke rather than Miami, one way or another, someone’s wildest dreams are going to come true when that game is over. Either Virginia — a school that hasn’t had a winning season since before the pandemic, whose coach looked to be in real trouble heading into the year, and that has won exactly one bowl game in 20 years — is going to make the Playoff, or James Madison might.
James Madison! A team that was losing to Colgate in the FCS second round a decade ago, a school that, it turns out, is also losing its coach to a Power 4 program (in the same conference with the guy it lost just two years ago, no less), a school whose most famous alumni might legitimately be that Barstool guy … it could make the Playoff. It will be, instantly, the greatest moment in any of those schools’ athletic histories. It might even catch the right number of breaks and win a game, instantly turning it into George Mason’s infamous run to the men’s college basketball Final Four — an eternal part of college football history.
That sure doesn’t sound like a College Football Playoff being devalued.
If anything, the Kiffin saga has put a very specific number on how much making the College Football Playoff is worth: $91 million. That’s how much Kiffin is getting from LSU, an amount that makes him the third-highest paid coach in college football. Learning that it requires $91 million to make you walk away from a team that you led into the Playoff, well, I’d say that’s the exact opposite of devaluing the CFP. If you paid me $91 million to care less about my team making the Playoff, well, yes, then I would probably find it within myself to do so.
But until you do that, I think I’m gonna love every minute of this thing. And so will the fans and the players and, yes, the coaches who are fortunate enough to make it there.