The outside noise around the Manning Center continues to play at max volume as most of the sports world awaits an answer from Lane Kiffin.
Will Kiffin choose to stay at Ole Miss and lead the Rebels into the College Football Playoff? Or will he choose to leave for LSU and, possibly, not coach Ole Miss in the playoffs?
If that second one happens, an important will have to be answered: how will it impact Ole Miss’s seeding in the playoff? Will a playoff game still be played in Oxford? Would the committee dare to drop the Rebels all the way out of the playoff?
Florida State fans would probably say “yes” to all of those. It was the Seminoles who were held out of the four-team playoff in 2023 despite being a 13-0 ACC Champion because they didn’t have their starting quarterback.
CFP Chairman speaks
During Tuesday’s rankings reveal show, CFP committee chairman Hunter Yurachek was asked about how the Rebels’ rank would be impacted by should Kiffin not be the team’s coach.
“It is in the protocol but I’m not sure we will have a data point to use that as part of the protocol,” Yurachek said. “We would not have seen the team play without a coach.
“We’ll take care of that when it happens. We don’t look ahead. The loss of a player, the loss of a key coach is in the principles of how we rank the teams. But again, we don’t have a data point for Ole Miss without their head coach.”
Ole Miss already fell one spot in the latest CFP rankings to No. 7, but Yurachek confirmed that was because of Oregon’s win against then-No. 15 USC and not anything related to Kiffin or Ole Miss.
“We didn’t have any discussion about Ole Miss and their coach,” Yurachek said. “That was all about Oregon and their performance against USC. Their strength of schedule continues to climb. They’ve been dominant on the offense and defensive side of the ball. Really good in special teams. The committee had been waiting for them to have a signature win to really put them where we thought they deserved to be.”
What does this mean?
Using the term “data point” seems somewhat odd. Is he saying because they don’t know how good (or bad) Ole Miss is without Kiffin because they haven’t seen it happen so it won’t be a consideration? Or just not a big factor in where Ole Miss is seeded?
But it would have to have some kind of impact if its in the protocol to consider a team without a key player or coach, right?
If so, then there’s a new data point for the discussion about allowing Kiffin to coach Ole Miss in the playoffs he chooses to leave.
