Since I will be spending all of Thanksgiving and Black Friday with family and Saturday is the big announcement day, this is my last chance to say something before we all find out what Lane Kiffin is up to. So, here are my closing comments.
There are only four head coaching hires that made me reflexively say, “oh [expletive deleted]” upon seeing them: Nick Saban to Alabama, John Calipari to Kentucky, Urban Meyer to Ohio State, and Jim Harbaugh to Michigan. I’m four-for-four on my swearing instinct and coaches going on to win national championships.
If I was a fan of another SEC team, would I see the news of Lane Kiffin going to Florida and instinctively go to a colorful metaphor? I think I’m too close to the situation to really say, but I would guess probably not.
But if Kiffin picks LSU on Saturday or before, would I then? I might.
The reason is because Kiffin has one great weakness as a head coach. He has a number of small ones, like getting too cute with play calls on occasion or drawing gratuitous attention to himself in a way that you may not want your university’s most prominent ambassador to. The one big one, however, is that he’s not a maniacal recruiter.
LSU is one of the few remaining schools that can recruit itself. Kids in Louisiana all dream of growing up and playing for the purple and gold regardless of whether they have the genetics for it or not. You can fill up half a recruiting class with quality players automatically simply by wearing that polo shirt.
Florida cannot. It probably never could, but the doors to the state were broken open a long time ago. It’s not just UF with this problem. Miami could once put a fence around south Florida, but no longer. There is not near as much draw to staying at home or staying in state here compared to kids from Louisiana.
In other words, LSU is a uniquely suited destination to ameliorate Kiffin’s main weakness as a head coach. To the extent that any other program can, like Ohio State and maybe still just a little bit Texas, those jobs are not open. The draw of family and the beach and Steve Spurrier and the Swamp may be enough to sway Lane to Gainesville, but I can’t say with a straight face that UF is absolutely the best place for him to go. It very well could be LSU.
I will also say that I don’t think Kiffin is likely to win a national championship at Florida. It is certainly possible, but it’s not likely.
I’ve gone over the math before: there are more than 20 programs that consistently put in the necessary investment to win a title, and many more that could do it for a time with the right coach like Indiana is doing now with Curt Cignetti.
On top of that, the House settlement that gave everyone a revenue sharing cap, along with the free transfer situation, levels the playing field more than at any other time in the sport’s history. Until and unless the provisions of the settlement get overturned for being anticompetitive, everyone has the same budget for revenue sharing, and all NIL contracts have to be for real market-rate endorsement deals. UF has an advantage there with Jordan brand and Gatorade and so forth, but only a couple of players a year can take full advantage of that. On the whole, most everyone has the same compensation level to work with.
If in some theoretical world where everyone on my 21-team list of teams that can realistically aspire to national championships is on the same competitive level, then you’d expect a team on that list to win a title once every 21 years. If Kiffin takes the job, I’m not sure he stays the 10 or 11 years required to even hit a 50% probability with those odds. The next time he puts down roots will be his first, and you never know if he’s going to do something stupid to get himself run out of town yet again.
Now, obviously the real world is not like that theoretical world. Sometimes a team on that list will employ a mediocre or terrible coach and remove themselves from contention for a time. Usually it’s quite a few of them, actually, which is why there’s so much churn among coaches.
The right head coach can also tilt the playing field in his favor through good player evaluation, development, and deployment. Kiffin seems good enough at the first two and excellent at the third. If compensation matters most in acquiring talent and everyone’s got the same budget, then college football is entering the part of the cycle where Xs and Os matter a lot more. Kiffin certainly is one of the best offensive Xs and Os guys out there.
So, I do think now is the right time for Florida to pursue Kiffin, if it ever is a good idea at all, versus back when it was replacing Jim McElwain or Dan Mullen. He’s proven capable of some things at Ole Miss that he never showed himself to be able to do before, which is why he’s a better candidate now than in 2021, and being lighter on recruiting while strong on scheme is a better fit for 2025 than 2017.
I just don’t know if Kiffin is strong enough a play caller to expect to win a title. He’d raise the floor tremendously and make the team more exciting. That alone might be enough. However, I just don’t know if he can get over the top at Florida because of how cutthroat competitive recruiting in the state is. Portal, yes; rev share, I know. But look at his recruiting classes at Ole Miss and see that he still has been signing a good number of high schoolers. Nearly everyone agrees now that you still have to build through recruiting and can’t just cherry pick a bunch of key starters in the portal. You can get a sugar high peak year from that, but it won’t get you a consistent winner.
And for that reason, I think Kiffin is likelier to win a title at LSU than Florida. I also don’t think it’s above 50% that he would be able to win a title in Gainesville, which is why I say it’s not likely or expected that he’d bring home a trophy. I’d love to be wrong, but that’s how I see it from where I sit today.
I am always thankful for you, the Gator Country VIP subscribers for you generous support. Let’s hope this story ends well.