Forty names, games, teams and minutiae making news in college football, where even a basketball coach knows the gridiron calendar is messed up. First Quarter: Shame On Everyone. Second Quarter: The SEC Makeover is Nearly Complete.
Third Quarter: Where the Playoff Tension Lies
The last performative College Football Playoff Top 25 rankings show is Tuesday, and this one actually is worth watching. It will offer some definitive insight into where playoff aspirants stand, and much of that should hold up through championship weekend and into Selection Sunday.
A rundown of five places where the playoff drama is thickest this week:
Oxford, Miss. (21)
The key question in the wake of the Lane Kiffin departure for LSU is whether Mississippi will be penalized by the CFP selection committee for losing its head coach and several assistants? The offensive staff was particularly hard hit, with Kiffin, coordinator Charlie Weis Jr., receivers coach George McDonald, tight ends coach Joe Cox and offensive analyst Sawyer Jordan reportedly ticketed to Baton Rouge. The only defensive staffer confirmed leaving is Kiffin’s brother, Chris, an analyst.
Does that loss of brainpower jeopardize Ole Miss’s ranking? The Rebels were No. 7 last week, and in a normal world would theoretically move up to No. 6 with Texas A&M’s loss. Yet the committee could say that a diminished coaching staff results in a diminished ranking.
Dash take: Throwing an 11–1 team completely out of the bracket would be a travesty. Dropping the Rebels to No. 9 or lower and sending them on the road for a first-round game, instead of the presumptive home game, would be a heavy penalty as well.
The difference between this and Florida State being trap-doored after the injury to quarterback Jordan Travis in 2023 is that the committee got a chance to see a Travis-less Seminoles team—and it was ugly. In Ole Miss’s case, what the team will look like without Kiffin and those offensive staff members is only supposition.
For those reasons, it would feel wrong to deprive Ole Miss of a first-round home game, which might be the biggest sporting event in state history. But common sense says the Rebels will not be as good of a team without Kiffin and his crew than it was with them. That’s another reason why the school’s bruised-ego rejection of Kiffin’s request to coach in the playoff could have negative effects.
Coral Gables, Fla. (22)
Staring at a second straight season of finishing just outside the playoff, Miami is mobilizing to raise awareness of the 10–2 Hurricanes’ qualifications for an at-large bid. That includes a social media post from athletic director Dan Radakovich pointing out areas where head-to-head results seem to have affected CFP rankings of teams with the same records—Georgia vs. Ole Miss, Texas Tech vs. BYU, Oklahoma vs. Alabama and the Crimson Tide vs. Vanderbilt.
1-loss UGA beat 1-loss Ole Miss - ranked ahead of them. Ditto for Texas Tech over BYU. 2-loss OU beat 2-loss Bama who beat 2-loss Vandy. @CFBPlayoff rankings reflect those results. How is @CanesFootball win over ND different? Head-to-head not “a” data point but “the” data point!
— Dan Radakovich (@DanRadakovich) December 1, 2025
The implication: No. 12-ranked Miami (10–2) should be ahead of ninth-ranked Notre Dame (10–2), which it beat to open the season. Both teams are finished playing. Does the committee give them further head-to-head examination this week, with the Hurricanes coming off a 31-point road win over Pittsburgh, two weeks after the Fighting Irish beat Pitt by 22 on the road?
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis followed up on social media Monday, amplifying the message.
If ND gets in and Miami doesn’t, it will further erode the importance of the regular season. I’m OK with both getting in, but identical records should mean the head-to-head is the tiebreaker if you have to choose between them. https://t.co/tPRRhqGijb
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) November 30, 2025
It’s only a matter of time before the most prominent resident of Mar-a-Lago weighs in on behalf of the Hurricanes.
It should not escape the committee’s attention that Miami has done its level best to run up the score the last two weeks. Carson Beck threw a 33-yard touchdown in the final minute against the Panthers, and a 20-yarder in the final minute with a 10-point lead against Virginia Tech. You’re not really fooling anyone, Canes.
Charlotte (23)
Miami’s situation is reflective of the larger problem of the Charlotte-based ACC, which will crown a champion that almost certainly will not be ranked with the CFP’s Top 12—either Tuesday night or on Selection Sunday. Miami is ranked well ahead of championship game participants Virginia and Duke, with the Blue Devils a lamentable 7–5 on the season and owning losses to Connecticut and Tulane.
ACC members Miami, Florida State, Louisville, SMU, North Carolina State, Wake Forest and Pittsburgh all have wins against current Top 25 teams. The Cavaliers and Blue Devils do not.
This is the fallout from having a 17-team league with wildly disparate schedules, a problem that is not exclusive to the ACC. Heedless and greed-stoked conference expansion has some serious drawbacks. Who knew?
The world’s biggest Duke fans will not be attending that game; they will be at James Madison, North Texas and Tulane. If the Blue Devils win the ACC title, it seems reasonable to assume that the league will be shut out of the playoff and two champions from the Group of 5 conferences will get in. This would be a massive embarrassment to the ACC, especially with Miami sitting home and unable to even play for the automatic bid.
On-the-bubble bluebloods (24)
Notre Dame, Alabama and Oklahoma will be eyeballing where they stand Tuesday night in relation to each other. Which of them is most vulnerable to a last-weekend knockout?
The Crimson Tide, currently No. 10, can alleviate all worry by winning the SEC championship against the opponent they own, Georgia. If they suffer a third loss, does that open them up to being bypassed for another team—possibly another SEC team?
Notre Dame, currently No. 9, must root for Texas Tech to dispatch BYU in the Big 12 title game, which would prevent the Big 12 from getting a second bid and dislodging the Irish to get it. (The game was not close the first time they played, with the Red Raiders winning 29–7.) The Irish are also rooting for Georgia to beat the Crimson Tide and put Bama in the more precarious position.
Oklahoma, currently No. 8, is the most secure of the three, especially with a win at Alabama. But the Sooners also lost by 17 points on a neutral field to Texas; is there a chance that the three-loss Longhorns’ 10-point win over previously undefeated Texas A&M puts them within close enough range of Oklahoma to make that head-to-head result resonate? Texas’s positioning Tuesday—along with that of noted non-blueblood Vanderbilt—will indicate whether either has a chance of sneaking in after huge victories Saturday.
Both the No. 16 Longhorns and No. 14 Commodores will be rooting for a BYU loss and a decisive defeat for Alabama on Saturday. But it remains to be seen whether either move ahead of Miami on Tuesday.
New Orleans and Harrisonburg, Va. (25)
For now, the selection committee ranks just one G5 team, Tulane at No. 24. If James Madison sneaks into the Top 25 on Tuesday, that thickens the plot, but American championship game participants North Texas and Tulane are very likely competing for an automatic bid. Sun Belt championship host James Madison needs to win its game against Troy—in spectacular fashion, if competing with the American champ for a lone G5 bid, or by nearly any margin if Duke completes its subversive mission to knock out its own league.
The Lane Train pulls into Baton Rouge, dramatic anecdotes in tow
Lane Kiffin was introduced at LSU to a hero’s welcome Monday. His early delivery at his opening news conference was a bit halting, which isn’t out of the ordinary—for all of Kiffin’s online sass, he’s not the most polished public speaker. But as he warmed up and went on, Kiffin did drop some interesting information and a wild anecdote about allegedly being endangered on the drive to the airport to leave Oxford, Miss.
Kiffin said he sought the advice of mentors he respects in the profession, notably his former bosses on championship teams, Pete Carroll and Nick Saban (26). Without directly quoting what they said, he implied that both men counseled him to take the LSU job.
“Everyone outside the state I was in basically said the same thing—you are going to regret it if you don’t go to LSU,” Kiffin said.
Kiffin also repeatedly made mention of choosing between four schools (27). Three are obvious and publicly known: Ole Miss, LSU and Florida. As for the fourth: Penn State or Auburn would be the only two that make sense, and Kiffin had already pulled out of an Auburn search three years ago when the Tigers were a better program than Mississippi.
Kiffin said the four contract offers were similar, although he also asserted that he never asked agent Jimmy Sexton what the specifics were. His bigger focus was the NIL war chests available.
“All four were extremely similar contracts,” Kiffin said. “The NIL packages were not similar, not the same. … [LSU] was the best setup.”
Kiffin threw Ole Miss’s rejection of his plea to stay on and coach the Rebels through the playoff into the lap of athletic director Keith Carter. Kiffin said the national media all believed he should stay on through the playoff—which is inaccurate, but some of us did say as much— but “he [Carter] has to live there [in Oxford],” and deal with the blowback from such a decision. Kiffin said he was still lobbying to stay on for the postseason (28) until Sunday morning.
“It wasn’t until Sunday that I was told that we couldn’t keep this thing in place and coach the playoff,” he said. “I’d already informed them Saturday night that [going to LSU] is what we’re going to do. That was a really hard conversation. Really hard.”
Kiffin wanted to have his King Cake and eat it, too. Which, again, might have been the best thing for the current team.
“How can we do the best interests of the players and give the players the best chance to win and make a run at the national championship … and it didn’t work out,” Kiffin said. “Came back the next day, thought it was going that direction. We met with the players, the players said, ‘O.K., let’s do this.’ ”
But the Ole Miss administration, according to Kiffin, said, “We can’t wrap our heads around this. Which, unfortunately, I respect.”
Kiffin hasn’t been shy about acting victimized in this, which is inappropriate—he created the inferno. Along those lines, he painted a vivid scene of nearly being “run off the road (29)” by angry Ole Miss fans while driving to the airport Sunday with his son, Knox. Kiffin said he had to turn around en route and called a local cop he knows for assistance.
“That affects you,” he said. “That airport scene, all the things being said? They’re saying that about you. And you think you’ve done a great job for six years.”
Upon arrival in Baton Rouge and being bathed in adoration, the mood changed drastically.
“Then you go, I absolutely made the right decision. And it all went away,” Kiffin said.
He was sufficiently stoked to call his old friend Ed Orgeron (30), famed bayou creature turned national champion coach at LSU, to tell him he’d reflexively started talking like the gravelly voiced Coach O.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Kiffin said, “but I’m feeling you right now.”
The LSU fans are feeling ecstatic, eating out of the palm of Kiffin’s hand after his yarn-spinning news conference. And the Ole Miss fans hate him even more than they already did Sunday.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Forde-Yard Dash: Breaking Down Potential CFP Drama, Lane Kiffin’s LSU Unveiling.
