Lane Kiffin isn’t sold on the SEC’s move to a nine-game conference schedule, and his concern has less to do with the extra heavyweight matchups than what they might do to the playoff picture.
Speaking Wednesday to the Baton Rouge Rotary Club, the LSU coach said he would have rather seen the league wait until the College Football Playoff selection committee put more weight on strength of schedule. In Kiffin’s view, SEC teams already live through the nation’s toughest weekly grind, but the committee still tends to favor records over the quality of the path.
That’s where he thinks the new format could backfire. A nine-game league slate, he said, only makes it more likely that SEC teams pile up additional losses. That could leave a 9-3 team with a strong resume on the outside looking in while an 11-1 team with a softer schedule gets the nod.
“We’ve got to get to the point where an 11-1 team that played one hard team and beat 11 teams it was supposed to beat isn’t automatically viewed as better than a 9-3 team that played really hard teams in really hard places, beat some of them and lost three,” Kiffin said.
He even tossed out a blunt, slightly playful alternative for judging teams.
“When it comes down to, ‘Is that team better than that team?,’ ask Las Vegas what the spread would be on a neutral site,” Kiffin said, drawing laughter from the audience. “They’re going to do it a lot better than a room of conference commissioners and former players saying which team is better.”
Kiffin also pointed to the transfer portal as a reason the SEC has become more balanced from top to bottom. In his telling, that makes every conference game tougher and every slip more costly. Add a ninth league game, and the odds of teams finishing with multiple losses go up.
The numbers back up how brutal LSU’s path looks. ESPN’s Football Power Index has the Tigers with the nation’s 11th-toughest schedule, and every SEC team is ranked in the top 20. LSU will also play five road SEC games for the first time in program history.
The Tigers begin preseason practice Wednesday and open the season at home against Clemson on Sept. 5 at 6:30 p.m. on ABC.
Kiffin also made clear that nothing will be handed out inside the program itself.
“Nobody just gets anything,” Kiffin said of depth chart competition. “Whether they’re returning players, whether they’re five-star players, whether they make this much money, none of that has anything to do with how much they’re going to play. That’s going to be earned on the field, through competition, every day in practice.”
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