speculation swirls around head coach Lane Kiffin<\/a> not just for the Florida job, but LSU too.<\/p>\n![\"ATHENS,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/f267b340-b2c1-11f0-96bf-85b40de4d52b.jpeg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Will Lane Kiffin stay at Ole Miss for the duration of this season and beyond? Or will he make the jump to an open job? (Roger Wimmer\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
(Roger Wimmer\/ISI Photos via Getty Images)<\/p>\n
Which one does he want? Where is it easier to win a national championship? That\u2019s going to be the conversation every day around Ole Miss until Kiffin either takes one of those jobs or pulls himself out of the mix \u2014 all while the team he\u2019s coaching right now has a shot to win the whole thing.<\/p>\n
How distracted will Kiffin be coming down the stretch? And what happens if Ole Miss is playing well into January? Will schools wait him out and risk losing other candidates, or will they demand an answer?<\/p>\n
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You can apply the same questions to Eli Drinkwitz at Missouri, Brent Key at Georgia Tech, Clark Lea at Vanderbilt, Jeff Brohm at Louisville and even perhaps Dan Lanning at Oregon, though any move away from the grip of Nike founder Phil Knight would be complicated and costly.<\/p>\n
How will it play out at those schools as they fight for playoff bids? It’s anyone’s guess because nothing of this magnitude has ever happened before in an era when so many teams remain in the postseason mix at this stage of the season. Ironically, the closest we\u2019ve ever come to this kind of situation was Nov. 29, 2021, when Kelly bolted Notre Dame for a massive 10-year contract while the Irish were still theoretically alive for the fourth playoff spot.<\/p>\n
It was an unsavory move, but LSU wasn\u2019t waiting for him, giving Kelly a short window to take the job he felt would deliver a long-awaited national title.<\/p>\n
Now, a mere four years later, Notre Dame is positioned better to win a championship under Marcus Freeman than Kelly ever imagined. And he\u2019s out of a job after failing to get LSU anywhere close to the title mix in his four years despite having a Heisman Trophy winner\/No. 2 overall draft pick in Jayden Daniels and another likely NFL quarterback in Garrett Nussmeier.<\/p>\n
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The other seismic coaching move that happened concurrent with Kelly-to-LSU was Lincoln Riley going from Oklahoma to Southern Cal. That hasn\u2019t worked out too great, either.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, low-key hires like Mike Elko at Texas A&M and Curt Cignetti at Indiana have proven transformative.<\/p>\n
All of which is to say that these schools are merely spinning an expensive roulette wheel. In most cases, they don\u2019t even know what their real candidate pool is going to look like. They\u2019re simply operating off a mandate for change and the vibes of coaching agents while hoping they\u2019ll catch a break.<\/p>\n
In all these firing statements, administrators will talk about making decisions in the long-term interest of their universities. Realistically, they don\u2019t even know what that looks like in a coaching carousel where this many schools are competing for a small handful of proven coaches who may or may not be willing to leave their current jobs.<\/p>\n
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It\u2019s all a guess, and it\u2019s going to be pure chaos.<\/p>\n
But in an era when perennial losers like Indiana, Ole Miss, Vanderbilt have moved into playoff contention due to smart investments while schools like LSU and Florida State spent themselves into a portal pickle, nobody can get their arms around what it\u2019s supposed to look like in the first place.<\/p>\n
In the old era, the traditional powers had all the advantages. The last three LSU coaches prior to Kelly all won national championships, and two of them \u2014 Ed Orgeron and Les Miles \u2014 were not exactly considered X-and-O gurus.<\/p>\n
A job like LSU was hard to screw up. Now, it\u2019s actually quite easy to screw up. In the SEC, where there\u2019s rarely an easy week, a couple bad personnel evaluations and whiffing on a coordinator hire will bury your season and prompt a fan revolt by the end of October.<\/p>\n
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That\u2019s the new reality, and it argues for a complete rethink in how schools hire coaches. Why would an administrator give out an eight- or 10-year contract with huge, guaranteed money to anyone when you know there is such a small margin for error?<\/p>\n
If LSU can be here, fewer than four years after hiring one of the most accomplished coaches in the sport, meeting with the governor of the state to try to figure out how to finance a buyout and a new coaching staff, it can happen to anyone.<\/p>\n
But college football being college football, and agents like Jimmy Sexton holding a lot of cards, this hiring cycle will only ratchet up the pressure on administrators and the willingness for schools to spend whatever it takes for the sugar high of winning a news conference.<\/p>\n
In a supply-and-demand world, there weren\u2019t enough accomplished coaches to fill these jobs even before LSU opened. Now, if anyone is counting on restraint to bring sanity, LSU has arrived at the ball to inject even more crazy.<\/p>\n
College football better be ready for the coaching shakeup that\u2019s coming. By January, much of the sport may not be recognizable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The coaching carousel of apocalyptic dreams is coming for college football, and the next six weeks are going…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":253784,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[8897,7147,137863,1607,2808,11404,399,44082,9228,2934,17021,15358,569,43305,7737,6342,5438,6747,398,396,397,34455,2232,8392,99,11412,7084,137864,20737,1339,1745],"class_list":["post-253783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-arkansas","tag-brian-kelly","tag-coaching-carousel","tag-college-football","tag-florida","tag-florida-state","tag-football","tag-garrett-nussmeier","tag-georgia-tech","tag-getty-images","tag-james-franklin","tag-jayden-daniels","tag-kentucky","tag-lane-kiffin","tag-louisville","tag-lsu-tigers","tag-michigan-state","tag-missouri","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaafootball","tag-ole-miss","tag-oregon","tag-penn-state","tag-sports","tag-stanford","tag-texas-am","tag-tyler-kaufman","tag-ucla","tag-virginia-tech","tag-wisconsin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}