College football’s most-wanted coach might ditch his team before it can play for a national title.

Ole Miss enters the final weeks of the college football season in the mix to win a national championship. Yet as soon as Saturday, before the College Football Playoff even begins, it could also lose its coach.

When the Rebels, who are 10-1 and ranked No. 6 in the latest playoff rankings, face rival Mississippi State on Friday, their fans could be excused for thinking more about two other Southeastern Conference opponents. After having fired their coaches earlier this season, LSU and Florida have spent recent weeks wooing Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin.

LSU officials “have discussed a seven-year, incentive-laden deal worth at least $90 million,” Yahoo reported recently, in addition to commitments to spend around $25 million more on building a roster. The salary could climb toward $100 million over seven years, The Athletic reported. Those figures could make Kiffin, who earns $9 million annually, among the highest-paid coaches in the sport and perhaps rank at the top. Florida and Ole Miss have reportedly matched such an offer.

Would a coach really choose to leave a team that has a chance to play for a national championship so late in a season? That answer will be known Saturday, according to Mississippi’s athletic director, Keith Carter, who posted Friday on X that he, Kiffin and the university’s chancellor had met.

“Coach Kiffin and I have had many pointed and positive conversations regarding his future at Ole Miss,” Carter wrote. “Despite the outside noise, Coach Kiffin is focused on preparing our team for the Egg Bowl, and together, we want to ensure that our players and coaches can concentrate fully on next Friday’s game.

“This team is on the cusp of an unprecedented season, and it’s imperative they feel the support of the Ole Miss family in the week ahead. An announcement on Coach Kiffin’s future is expected the Saturday following the game.”

The school declined an interview request for Kiffin.

The statement, and the frustration and timeline it revealed, was extraordinary in college athletics, in which the inner workings of coaching decisions are often brokered by third-party search firms hired by schools and rarely play out publicly in such level of detail. The statement might not have been issued had something else extraordinary not gone public — trips by members of Kiffin’s family to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where LSU is located, and Gainesville, Florida, the home of the Gators. Kiffin’s family traveled to Baton Rouge on a private plane sent by LSU, according to a report.

Then again, nothing about Kiffin’s career arc, or coaching style, is typical.

The son of a famed defensive coach, Kiffin joined the industry and quickly rose in its ranks. He was just 31 when Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis picked him to be the NFL franchise’s youngest coach.

Less than two years later, Davis fired Kiffin, calling him a “disgrace” and a “professional liar” who “conned me like he conned all you people.”

He quickly rebounded with the top job at Tennessee, in college football’s most cutthroat conference, but he infuriated its fan base when he left for Southern California after just one season. In 2013, Kiffin was still coaching storied USC when the Trojans, mired in a losing streak, landed in Los Angeles after a road loss. He didn’t make it back to campus. Steps from the tarmac, Kiffin was fired.

And in 2017, only one year after having helped vaunted Alabama win a national championship as its offensive coordinator, Kiffin was abruptly fired by iconic coach Nick Saban only days before the Crimson Tide attempted to win a second consecutive championship.

Yet if some schools have gone to memorable lengths in the past to fire Kiffin, college football superpowers have spent the past month courting him — all while Mississippi, where he has coached since 2020, is desperately seeking to keep him. Though Kiffin’s teams have yet to make the playoff in five previous seasons, Ole Miss has won 10-plus games four times — as many 10-win seasons as it produced in its previous 57 seasons combined before Kiffin arrived in 2020.

The reputation of Kiffin, 50, may have risen and fallen over the last two decades, but what haven’t changed are the visor he wears on sidelines and his ability to produce points, with the Rebels scoring 37 points per game, 13th nationally. That value that has made him the most in-demand figure in the most tumultuous hiring-and-firing cycle in recent memory.

LSU has a vacancy only because it opted to fire coach Brian Kelly even though his contract called for a $54 million buyout. The firing followed Penn State’s dismissal of James Franklin, even though it owed him nearly $50 million in a buyout; the school and Franklin later negotiated a settlement that reduced the buyout to $9 million. The abrupt firings — Penn State was in the playoff semifinals only last season, while LSU was 34-14 under Kelly — have been sped up by college football’s calendar, in which universities want new coaches in place by early December, when players are free to transfer and change schools.

Kiffin’s dilemma also has raised the question of whether schools like LSU and Florida that traditionally have been considered among the most attractive to coach at remain top jobs when rule changes allowing college athletes to be compensated directly by schools or for their names, images and likenesses (NIL) have leveled the playing field.

The latest College Football Playoff rankings include longtime also-rans, No. 2 Indiana and No. 5 Texas Tech, a pair of non-blueblood programs they were rejuvenated by a mixture of high-powered compensation and coaching. The expansion of the playoff to 12 teams has widened the opportunity for schools such as Ole Miss to challenge the typical powers. In the past decade, schools changed how they attracted top coaches by offering not only top dollar, but also sizable pools of money dedicated to hiring top assistant coaches, too.

In the NIL era, the deciding factor for coaches choosing between jobs is how much money schools and their boosters can commit toward building rosters, said a coaching agent who asked not to be identified so as to not compromise relationships with administrators.

Leaving a potential title contender on the verge of the postseason is not without precedent; in 1989, Michigan men’s basketball coach Bill Frieder accepted a job at Arizona State days before the NCAA Tournament began, and he was immediately kept away from the Wolverines by the school’s athletic director. A few weeks later, as Michigan was raising the championship trophy, Frieder was left to watch from a Sheraton.

Saban, now an ESPN analyst, criticized college football’s calendar — and not Kiffin, with whom he shares an agent — as the reason a coach might consider leaving a title contender late in a season.

“None of this is fair to the players,” Saban said Saturday on ESPN’s “College GameDay.” “This is not a Lane Kiffin conundrum. This is a college football conundrum that we need some leadership to step up and change the rules on how this gets done in terms of coaching searches and opportunity for people to leave.”

What could keep Kiffin in Mississippi? Last summer, he described “an amazing five years personally and professionally there in Oxford” that coincided with what he has called a healthier work-life balance. His daughter, son and ex-wife all live nearby, he has said. He became sober in 2021. A little while later, he added hot yoga to his weekly routine.

“If Lane Kiffin is listening,” ESPN commentator Pat McAfee said on “College GameDay,” “you’re allowed to be happy and content, brother. You’re allowed to be at a place and have massive success. You’re allowed to build a place from scratch. You’re allowed to become a [greatest of all time] at a place.”

Around the same time, in 2022, Auburn tried to poach Kiffin in what would have been an intraconference hiring. The Tigers could offer Kiffin a more realistic pathway to a national title, having won one and played for another since 2010. The pursuit was not dissimilar to LSU’s and Florida’s this fall.

Kiffin believed his drawn-out decision and dalliance were a good thing because they led to a surge of giving toward Ole Miss’ name, image and likeness.

“So you can look at it and say, all right, there’s something we wish wouldn’t have happened and the whole Auburn thing was a distraction,” Kiffin told ESPN in 2023. “But you can also look at it and say, if that didn’t happen, what would the collective be? And not just in what we signed in the last portal and recruiting class, but the future? Or, more importantly, keeping our own players.”

Now Ole Miss is trying to retain its coach, again, along with its championship ambitions. The Rebels aren’t just playing a football game Friday. They’re also playing a waiting game.