College Football Sea Change

It’s August, and so here we find ourselves on the cusp of the 2024 college football season, and Ole Miss enters the season ranked sixth in the coach’s poll, which came out today. Almost certainly, this team is the most talented football team in Ole Miss’ history, and interestingly, it is coming at a time of huge changes in the world of college football, changes that I now understand are being welcomed and utilized by Ole Miss’ visionary coach, Lane Kiffin. Yes, you read that right. I just praised Kiffin. In previous posts in this space, I have criticized him as a hollywood coach, a player’s coach, a coach better suited to the NFL, and the like, and he is all of those things, but what I failed to understand then was that Kiffin is the among the vanguard of a new era of college football, and he is poised, probably better than anyone, to emerge into the new era as a winner.

All of these changes, NIL (name image likeness) in particular, are the result of lawsuits, which aren’t much discussed, and so all these changes people are perceiving aren’t well understood, but the essence of it is that these players are soon going to get paid on top of the table for their services, and for a few years all sorts of Hell is going to break loose until it all gets figured out. What that is actually going to end up looking like is anyone’s guess. I would like to see the football teams get spun-off from the universities and made into separate legal entities that keep the same branding, and maintain a symbolic tether to the old universities, but actually just operate as minor-league NFL teams. I think that is good for the football teams and good for the universities, but again, I don’t know what it is going to end up looking like.

We went to the Spring game back in March and endured a flag-football goof-off, which was fine, I guess, and Kiffin argues it saves injuries and yields mimimal benefit, and I’m inclined to accept his arguments. Today, though, as I’m scanning the headlines from the practice reports and various writeups, I keep running across articles about how Kiffin is running his two-a-days more like an NFL camp, meaning he isn’t running two-a-days at all.

Kiffin spoke Monday about his staff’s philosophy on the start of fall camp and the health of his team, explaining how the Rebels are taking a more measured, professional approach, rather than the all-out physical gauntlets of The Junction Boys era.

Kiffin is still making the argument that he needs to conserve his team’s health. What to make of this? He goes on about it:

“It doesn’t tell you quite as much about conditioning. The old way used to be two-a-days everyday, but even after that, the majority of people are still practicing every day. For the first five days, we only had three practices. Even when they go back-to-back days in camp, it’ll be a morning then not until night the next day—so a full day and a half off. Which is okay. It’s why it’s ramp-up. You gradually get up there. If you’re training for distance, you don’t run 20 miles the first day. It makes more sense, it’s just against our wiring as coaches.”

He’s calling it “ramp-up”, which apparently is how they do camp in the NFL. Apparently, they slowly build to full speed rather than jumping out of the gate at full speed.

Here it is, folks, right here at Ole Miss, the era of the NFL minor league has arrived. Here we are. Kiffin is a visionary, and that’s why all these players want to transfer to Ole Miss to play for him. He’s on the cutting edge of all of these changes, and that makes Ole Miss a major player in the college football sea change, and that is remarkable.

I understand now that my resistance to Kiffin was rooted in my love of the old amateurism, you know, old State U, when the boys from Mississippi took on the boys from Arkansas and it seemed to mean something. I know full well that the old amateurism has been mostly a fiction for many decades now already, but still, one can admit that and also simultaneously acknowledge that it was the amateurism that made college football so interesting in the first place, that unlike the NFL, college players played for their love of old State U, not money, for pride in their home State.

All of that is soon to be gone, and the old amateur era of college football will become history of the game, or just lore.