Lane Kiffin has been loud about the SEC’s nine-game schedule from the start, and he still isn’t backing off.
He made that clear again on Monday while getting ready for Auburn, expanding on the same complaint he first voiced when the league adopted the format. Kiffin has argued that the extra conference game was a bad decision from the jump, and he’s sticking with that position even as LSU sits at 2-2 in SEC play with five conference games still ahead.
On the SEC teleconference a month ago, Kiffin didn’t soften his stance.
“This is nothing I haven’t said to the commissioner or didn’t say when it was brought up years ago about making this decision - that this was going to really be a poor decision and really not thought out,” Kiffin said in the SEC's teleconference a month ago.
His broader point is simple: one more league game means more losses, and the math doesn’t care who’s making the schedule.
“And they kinda said when it was proposed, they said, 'Well, okay, you're going to take on eight more losses,'” Kiffin said. “I mean, that's going to be real, there's no way of changing the math, that's going to happen.”
Kiffin pointed to Auburn as an example of how the extra game can reshape how a team looks on paper. In his view, a conference loss can carry far more weight than the result it replaced.
“So you see that, I think somebody said there's two SEC teams in the top-10 right now, and I said before it started, I said, 'Take away the first SEC game that you play because that's going to be brand new, the ninth one came early and got added and replaced an early win, you know where's that going to put you?" Kiffin asked.
He then used Auburn to make the case even more sharply.
“Look at this team [Auburn Tigers], if you took away their first SEC loss, and it was just a win versus a Group of Six team, they'd be a top-10 team right now,” Kiffin argued. “They'd have one loss, on the road at Tennessee to a really good team. And somehow now, because of adding an extra game, they're not even ranked and they just beat the number one team in the country.”
Kiffin ended that answer by circling back to the broader issue with college football’s current system.
“It’s just where football is, and they can't see like they do in basketball or baseball, metrics, so it is what it is.”
He made a similar point in September, when he said a chart sent to SEC coaches showed how punishing the league’s remaining slate was for top teams.
“There was a graphic sent today to some of the SEC coaches, and it was top-25 teams and ranked opponents left,' Kiffin said on that teleconference in September. "It really puts it into perspective, in the Power Four, how ridiculous this is."
Before the Texas A&M game, he also compared the SEC’s schedule gauntlet to the rest of the country.
“It starts with Texas playing seven top-25 teams left,” Kiffin said before the Texas A&M game. “Then you have other conferences - and I’m not ripping on any school.
I’m just saying these are the facts. You have a Big 12 school that doesn’t play one ranked team the rest of the year, and you have an ACC team that plays zero ranked teams the rest of the year.”
The conference’s goal with the nine-game setup is clear: give its teams enough strength of schedule to make a two-loss playoff case.
Kiffin’s concern is that the tradeoff comes at the expense of health and can bury teams that are still good enough to reach the 12-team field. With no undefeated teams in the sport and only four teams sitting with one loss, there’s already a pileup. Five games remain for most teams, and for nearly everyone, at least three of those matchups are against ranked opponents.
That’s where Kiffin’s complaint lands. The SEC’s depth is creating the losses, and the ninth game adds one more hurdle. But it’s not the reason the league looks like this right now.
The timing matters too: the conference has hit a stretch where nearly everybody can beat everybody else, and that parity is what’s stacking losses across the standings. The extra conference game only makes the climb a little steeper.
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