By Michael GallagherShareNewsweek is a Trust Project memberOle Miss Rebels fans are presumably just days away from learning the fate of both their College Football Playoff hopes and their head coach Lane Kiffin.
With Friday’s Egg Bowl matchup against Mississippi State as the hard deadline Kiffin was given to notify the school whether he plans to take either the head-coaching job at LSU or Florida, or stay in Oxford, suspense has been building as Kiffin is set to make one of the more highly anticipated decisions in college football in recent memory.
Seemingly every analyst has an opinion about what Kiffin should do, but perhaps none more important to diehard college football fans than ESPN “College GameDay” host Kirk Herbstreit.
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...On a recent episode of his “Nonstop” podcast, which he hosts with former Ohio State great Joey Galloway, Herbstreit sounded off on the drama surrounding Kiffin and Ole Miss leading up to Friday’s rivalry game.
“He loves this team, and he wants to win this championship right now, but with the system and the timing of everything, the way it currently is, he’s got to make a decision,” Herbstreit said. “… [If he decides to leave] does the school let him stay and coach into their magical season the way Scott Frost did at UCF when they won all their games? They allowed him to stay before he left to go to Nebraska. Or do you think, ‘Get out of here. If you don’t want to be here, we don’t want you here. Get out of here.'
"And then [if] they name an [interim] coach — does that impact them in the CFP rankings because it's one of those four stipulations if a player or coach is removed or injured and not able to participate, that could affect your ranking. [It’s] just such a messy thing for Lane or any coach to be put in. The timing of this is awful because he goes from being a hero to potentially being looked at as, 'We don't want to see you, don't ever come back.'"
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Herbstreit made it clear that he feels for Kiffin being put in the situation he’s in with the College Football Playoff on the horizon, but he also added there’s one simple solution for Kiffin to make the headache and the media circus go away: stay put.
“I hope he stays, personally, at Ole Miss,” Herbstreit added.
If Kiffin does bolt for LSU or Florida, Ole Miss then has to decide if it will let Kiffin continue coaching the team through its College Football Playoff run or cut ties with him ASAP and turn the reins over to an assistant coach.
Galloway, however, pitched an intriguing way to decide.
“I think it should be a player decision on whether he stays or not,” he stated. “… The players are the ones who are with him every day, they came there to play for him — I think they should decide on whether he stays if he makes a decision to go somewhere else.”
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