Lane Kiffin stood at the SEC Media Days podium in Tampa and said the quiet part with the same calm you get from a guy who already spent the money and still hates the menu. High school kids who have never taken a college snap are pricing themselves like proven veterans, and the whole sport is pretending this is sustainable. I felt that familiar knot form right under my ribs when the quotes hit, because he is not wrong, and the people who will scream loudest already know it.
“Our system is a little bit screwed up in my opinion,” Kiffin said. Then he went further. “The kids that haven’t played at all coming out of high school should be making less. … There should be a freshman or rookie cap (for how much they can make), and then (have) max slots per position that they make. Then they’re signed to multi-year contracts, so no you do really get into building through high school because that guy could stay longer.”
I have been around this game long enough to hear coaches dance. This was not a dance. This was the NFL veteran watching rookies cash bigger checks than the ten-year guys who kept the lights on, which is exactly the parallel Kiffin drew to drafting JaMarcus Russell before the league fixed the rookie scale. The kids with zero college film are the new JaMarcus contracts, and the veterans (or the portal guys who already produced somewhere) are watching the money walk out the door before anyone proves they can block, tackle, or stay eligible.
The Freshman Price Tag Just Became a Flex, Not a Bet
Look at the numbers that actually landed this week. Five-star running back David Gabriel Georges commits to Tennessee and the expected first-year NIL number floats around $2 million. That blows past the roughly $750,000 Michigan paid Savion Hiter a year ago for the same unproven slot. An unnamed SEC general manager told On3 that $350,000 is now the starting price for a low four-star. Another GM projected $7-8 million just to assemble a Top 25 high school class. Nothing is reasonably priced anymore. Everyone has an agent. There are no layups.
I sat with those figures and felt the same slow burn I get watching a casino floor when the new money starts outspending the house. This is not development. This is an auction for potential, and the house (the schools trying to build culture through high school) keeps losing. Kiffin’s point lands hardest here: if a true freshman can enter the portal after one year of limited snaps and chase a bigger bag, why would any rational program treat high school recruiting like a long-term investment? You cannot build when the foundation walks.
LSU itself just spent more than $40 million constructing a transfer class that ranked near the top of the portal. Sam Leavitt at roughly $4.5 million. Jordan Seaton around $4 million. Princewill Umanmielen at $1.5 million. Kiffin is not some outsider throwing rocks. He is the guy who just paid retail for proven production because the alternative (betting big on unproven high school money that can leave after year one) looks like bad business. That is the stomach punch. The coach calling for the rookie cap just proved why everyone else is running to the portal.
Multi-Year Deals Are the Real Fight, Not the Cap Talk
Kiffin wants multi-year contracts locked to those rookie slots so a program can actually develop. I buy that completely. Right now the system rewards the hit-and-run. Play a little, get mad about snaps or money, hit the portal, cash again. The NFL fixed the equivalent mess with slotted rookie deals and real hard caps that everyone can see. College has a soft suggestion dressed up as revenue sharing, contracts that stay private, and no real enforcement. Kiffin called that out too: it is not a hard cap, so it is not a real cap. Different teams play by different rules, and the ones with the loudest boosters win the arms race while everyone else pretends the spreadsheet still matters.
I keep coming back to the Goodfellas kitchen scene energy of all this. The young guys start living larger than the made men who put in the work, the bosses shrug, and eventually the whole operation gets sloppy. College football is living that right now. Unproven freshmen commanding veteran money while portal vets who already produced get treated like the only rational spend. The development model dies quietly while the auctioneers keep shouting higher numbers.
Will a real rookie cap ever happen? Antitrust lawyers are already sharpening knives the second anyone says “cap” and “amateur” in the same sentence. But Kiffin is not drafting legislation. He is describing the incentive structure that made him build through the portal and will keep making every smart coach do the same. You cannot shame programs into high school loyalty when the math punishes it.
I used to believe the transfer portal was the necessary correction after decades of one-sided power. Now I watch a true freshman running back get $2 million before he has a college carry and I wonder if we just replaced one broken power dynamic with a more expensive one. Kiffin said the system is screwed up. He spent $40 million proving he understands exactly how. The question is whether anyone with actual power wants to fix the incentives, or if we just keep writing bigger checks to kids who have never played a down and calling it progress.
The sport does not need another soft suggestion. It needs the equivalent of what the NFL did after the JaMarcus era: slots, multi-year deals that actually bind, and a hard line on what unproven talent can command. Until then, every Media Days podium speech about culture and development is just noise over the sound of the auctioneer’s gavel.
