ATLANTA — There will be a football game here at noon Saturday. Mercedes-Benz Stadium is sold out. Football fans in Penn State and Ole Miss sweatshirts dot the streets of downtown, inside Centennial Olympic Park, and the line outside the World of Coca-Cola museum.
Saturday’s Peach Bowl is a New Year’s Six game, which means it’s supposed to be a big deal. It matches the 10th-ranked Nittany Lions and 11th-ranked Rebels. James Franklin vs. Lane Kiffin.
The new era of college football, though, has rendered this game more of an exhibition than anything meaningful. Less pageantry, more nihilist fantasy.
Franklin and Kiffin last coached a game more than a month ago, and while they have spent the last few weeks running practices ahead of Saturday, the new reality of their jobs has made the last month about so much more than coaching. Their respective conference championships were on Dec. 2. Two days later, the floodgates opened as the NCAA transfer portal unbolted. Mississippi has lost a dozen players from its roster to the portal. Penn State has lost three.
According to College Football Network’s bowl opt-out tracker, nearly 40 players from Orange Bowl rosters (Florida State vs. Georgia) hit the transfer portal, and 29 more from the rosters of Missouri and Ohio State were in the portal ahead of Friday night’s Cotton Bowl.
It’s not just non-playoff teams being impacted. Nearly 20 players combined from the four teams in Monday’s College Football Playoff semifinals hit the portal. Sure, most of them are not high-impact players, but imagine preparing for the biggest game of the season with fewer bodies in practice. Imagine preparing for the biggest game of the season while also trying to recruit transfer portal targets to your own roster.
“Ask NFL teams, if they were getting ready to start the playoffs, would they ever put free agency right before it?” Kiffin asked during a press conference Friday. “And not just players negotiating for the next season, negotiating whether they’re going to play in the playoffs.”
It’s all part of a “system that is not going to get better until it gets fixed,” Kiffin said, and even an expanded playoff system that would have both of these teams as participants won’t fix it all.
Saturday’s game also will feature opt-outs not tied to the portal. Penn State’s star defensive end Chop Robinson won’t play as he prepares for the NFL draft. Same with Ole Miss defensive end Cedric Johnson. Franklin revealed Friday that cornerback Johnny Dixon is not in Atlanta. Both teams also have draft prospects who likely won’t play the full game.
Penn State also is preparing for the game with interim coordinators. Yes, Franklin fired offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich after the Michigan loss, but this current calendar setup also meant that former defensive coordinator Manny Diaz had no choice but to get his name out there for the head coach opening at Duke.
Part of this has always been what comes with missing out on a championship. Saturday is as much about preparing for next season as it is tying a bow on the one that effectively ended six weeks ago.
But the new era of the transfer portal and NIL has created a chaotic mess that irks coaches as much as it does fans.
Kiffin gave props to Franklin, calling the Penn State coach “a model” for the current era and complimented him for leading a program that doesn’t usually have players opting out or hitting the transfer portal before January.
“I think that’s rare nowadays,” Kiffin said.
“I think that I’ve been very critical of the calendar, very critical of the system, even though we try to obviously maximize the system, but it’s really not good. In talking with a lot of coaches over the last two weeks, there’s been a lot of struggles, and it’s a poor system. You don’t have free agency during the season. That doesn’t happen with no parameters around it. And that’s what we’re dealing with. Talking to coaches around the country dealing with players coming in, they’re going to opt out for the game or they’re going to transfer if they don’t play this many plays or they don’t get this much money. I mean, what are we talking about?”
Franklin pointed to UCLA coach Chip Kelly’s recent comments on college football needing to become independent from other NCAA sports. Kelly, Franklin said, voiced publicly what many in the business have been saying privately. College football needs a commissioner, Franklin said.
Current NCAA president Charlie Baker wants to create a new Division I subdivision, allowing schools with the most athletic resources to offer unlimited educational benefits and direct NIL partnerships and payments.
The current calendar and setup, Franklin said, is not “in anybody’s best interests.”
Kiffin said finding a solution is “a long conversation of a lot of different areas of a system that’s very (broken)” and “not thought out.”
“Right now, the way I see it, the commissioners of the conferences are the best people to solve these problems,” Franklin said. “Get them all into a room together. You could have representation from the NCAA as well, the NFL, and sit down and really start from scratch, a whole new calendar, a whole new model. I think that’s how this is really going to get done moving forward. But it needs to happen, and I think it needs to happen quickly. Right now, there’s no parameters. There’s no guardrails.
“I think me and Lane came up in this profession where it was started – the starting point was based on education. Right now, there’s not one rule or decision being made based on education. I think there’s a way to really balance both and be able to get both things done.”
Education? In this economy? That ship sailed long ago.
For now, there’s a football game to be played here. The stadium will be filled, and the revenue seems to keep rolling. Little else seems to matter.