On Friday afternoon as the sun begins to set on the Magnolia State, Ole Miss will have an answer and a subsequent decision to make.
Between the conclusion of the Egg Bowl between the Rebels and Mississippi State in Starkville, Miss., and the time the team’s buses make it back to Oxford, Miss., the school’s administration is supposed to receive an answer from their mischievous head coach Lane Kiffin.
Are you staying here for 2026 or are you taking a job at LSU, Florida or elsewhere?
They will need to sit back and listen as he relays his decision, which seems to be known only between Kiffin’s own ears at this point, and process it calmly. Ole Miss will then need to decide what to do next.
By all indications that is what every scorned lover says to the person already on the way out the door: Yell at Kiffin to take a hike.
The Rebels can tell Kiffin to pack it up and head out of town on Saturday, if they want. They are well within their rights given that he is likely set to be in charge at an SEC rival next season.
They could also be doing so at their own peril.
If Ole Miss kicks Kiffin to the curb before Selection Sunday, it could be the biggest fumble of the College Football Playoff era by picking feelings over football, pride before points and a resolution before a final ranking.
Show Kiffin the door and the Rebels could, and really should, also say goodbye to their chances of hosting a first-round playoff game.
Which would be perfectly apt for this entire situation. If you hire Lane Kiffin, you better be prepared to put up with, well, Lane Kiffin. Ole Miss brass seemed fine with that right up until this week when they finally said enough is enough with the games their coach is playing anywhere but on the field.
Now, instead of being in line to host the biggest party the Grove has ever seen, the selection committee is well within its rights to dock the program its right to host a playoff game despite being ranked No. 7 in the latest Top 25.
Does Ole Miss really dislike this entire situation enough that it would kiss millions of dollars goodbye from one more time out at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium and instead enjoy a trip to South Bend to face a Notre Dame team nobody wants to play in freezing conditions? All instead of having home field advantage—potentially against an Alabama team that Kiffin would crawl over broken glass to beat given their own unceremonious firing of the coach in the playoff several years ago?
The chatter around Kiffin is starting to become deafening where it’s pretty much the first thing anybody connected to college football is going to discuss during this rivalry weekend.
Except for one very key demographic it seems, in a wood-paneled conference room at a resort just north of the Dallas–Fort Worth airport where the selection committee meets every week.
“We didn’t have any discussion about Ole Miss and their head coach,” said committee chair Hunter Yurachek on Tuesday night. “We don’t have a data point for Ole Miss without their head coach.”
No data point yet, but soon enough a decision will have to be made on the subject whether the committee wants to deal with it or not.
After Week 13, the biggest CFP debate is no longer about No. 13 Miami’s head-to-head win over No. 9 Notre Dame when it comes to making the 12-team field. That is yesterday’s news after the committee finally acknowledged the two teams were being compared directly against each other and that they would still rank the Irish well ahead of the Hurricanes.
Now the topic du jour for those in the room over the next week is the same one which has swept up the rest of the sport.
What will Kiffin do?
“We’ll take care of that when it happens. I mean, we don’t look ahead. The loss of a player, loss of a key coach is in the principles of how we rank the teams,” added Yurachek, in the middle of his own coaching search as Arkansas’s athletic director. “It could be considered by the committee.”
The selection committee’s protocol is clear that it will be considered in its final rankings. Bullet point No. 4 listed under the group’s principles is as follows:
“Other relevant factors such as unavailability of key players and coaches that may have affected a team’s performance during the season or likely will affect its postseason performance.”
One would have to live under a rock to think that losing a head coach for a playoff run would not have a material impact on a team’s performance.
It’s Kiffin who is 31–6 the past three seasons with a roster which has been continually revamped and is the program’s primary play-caller. He is the voice in the quarterback’s ears on game day and the one who is setting the practice schedule for the entire team from now until kickoff on Dec. 19 or 20.
If you don’t believe any of that, just pull up a clip of Kiffin on the headset while tossing his play sheet in the air well before a touchdown is actually scored. There’s a reason LSU and Florida want to back the Brink’s truck up for his services and why Ole Miss is so worked up about losing what might be the greatest modern-day coach in school history based on his record.
Nobody is saying the Rebels shouldn’t be in the actual playoff field. They’ve earned that. They lost by one score on the road to No. 4 Georgia, blew out a team that is likely in the CFP field in No. 24 Tulane and beat a fellow SEC team in line for a playoff home game in No. 8 Oklahoma.
It’s a good team. With Kiffin, it could even be a great one in a series of one-off matchups.
Without its head coach though, it’s not the same Ole Miss we’ve seen the past three months.
There are criteria that should direct the committee to drop the Rebels down a few spots to protect the integrity of the bracket matchups as much as there is precedent. In the four-team era, undefeated Florida State losing starting quarterback Jordan Travis was all the committee needed to drop the Seminoles in 2023.
Kiffin may no longer be throwing passes, but he sure is the biggest factor in terms of the when, where and why Ole Miss will have Trinidad Chambliss dropping back to find a receiver in any playoff game.
So on Friday afternoon, the Rebels just need to take a breath. They should think about what others would do, or what potential CFP team North Texas is doing with its head coach already accepting a job, and let Kiffin see things out no matter what he decides.
The here and now in Oxford is pretty important and telling the head coach to hit the road is opening a Pandora’s box that would lead to getting stripped of one of the best moments in program history.
After all, isn’t it better to have loved and won than have loved Lane and lost a home playoff game?
Ole Miss is about to find out this week.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Lane Kiffin’s Decision Could Cost Ole Miss a Home College Football Playoff Game.
