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Longtime college basketball coach Rick Pitino thinks something is broken with college football. He made his feelings known while addressing Lane Kiffin leaving Ole Miss before the start of the College Football Playoff.
Kiffin is leaving Ole Miss for the head coaching job with LSU. Therefore, he will not be allowed to coach the Rebels in the College Football Playoff despite leading the team to a 11-1 record. (He might still get paid for it, though.) Mississippi made that decision despite Kiffin making threats if the school did not let him continue to coach the team through the playoffs.
Rick Pitino, the 73-year-old St. John’s University head basketball coach, has been around the block and has very little filter at this point, took to X (Twitter) to question the whole situation.
“I’m not knocking football, but there’s something wrong with their calendar,” Pitino wrote on Monday. “I’m at SJU and we are potentially a one seed and can win a National Championship this year, and I leave in March??? What’s going on here?”
What’s going on here is Ole Miss is really angry that Lane Kiffin is leaving for LSU. The timing of the announcement truthfully falls on him. If he really wanted to continue to coach the Rebels through the College Football Playoff, he could have waited. He didn’t.
Therefore, Ole Miss officials have gone into full petty mode. They even went so far as to move all of Kiffin’s stuff, including the suits that Kiffin wore to games and press conferences, out of the football facilities and basically on to the street.
The current system for college football coaches is broken
All that being said, Rick Pitino isn’t exactly wrong in questioning college football. The current system stinks. $1.04 billion in buyouts will have been paid to coaches since the College Football Playoff system began after the 2014 season.
Unfortunately, that problem doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon. LSU, which is currently still on the hook for a nearly $54 million buyout owed to Brian Kelly, reportedly just gave Lane Kiffin a $72.8 million buyout as part of his contract.
About the only way this situation gets straightened out at this point seems to be legislation. That could mean Congress passing a bill called the Correcting Opportunity and Accountability in Collegiate Hiring Act (COACH Act). Or it could mean other government intervention. Because as things currently stand, especially after seeing how LSU has behaved, colleges are not going to be policing themselves.