may get ugly based on Ole miss ON3 site:
Lane Kiffin is trying to cause chaos.
The one and only window for college football players to enter the NCAA Transfer Portal closes at 11:59 p.m. CT on Friday.
What’s happening now, however, isn’t just a mad dash for late additions. It’s a stress test — of contracts, of locker rooms, and of whether anything in this sport actually carries consequence anymore.
Ole Miss and LSU have built two of the nation’s best portal classes. But this isn’t friendly competition. Kiffin isn’t recruiting to keep pace. He’s trying to scorch the earth at his old school.
He nearly did last month. Kiffin left a playoff-bound Ole Miss team on the eve of the postseason. The Rebels promoted Pete Golding, steadied themselves, and reached the semifinals anyway — even with Kiffin attempting to trip them up along the way.
First came the public pressure. Kiffin leaned on media allies to push Ole Miss into letting him coach the Rebels through the postseason. The school said no. Then came the assistants bound for LSU. A few were permitted to remain briefly, ostensibly to help keep things normal for the current roster.
In reality, they were targeting Ole Miss players.
Kevin Smith went after Kewan Lacy. He failed. Or so it seemed.
Lacy re-signed with Ole Miss. So did Princewill Umanmielen. But late Thursday night, Umanmielen entered the portal anyway. Sources indicate Ole Miss intends to hold him to his contract.
What does that actually mean? No one is entirely sure. And no one operates more comfortably in the gray than Kiffin.
Contracts in college football are supposed to matter — until they don’t. Enforcement is murky, precedent is thin, and deterrence is almost nonexistent. That’s the space Kiffin is attacking.
Devin Harper also re-upped with Golding and Co. He was in Baton Rouge on Thursday, visiting with TJ Dottery. Dottery never signed a new deal with Ole Miss, though the sides had been negotiating for weeks.
Things shifted this week, and only after Kiffin leaked contract details through agents connected to Ole Miss transfer signees. Now, through Dottery and others, Kiffin is making a run at Harper and Umanmielen.
He’s fighting dirty. And he’s banking on no one stopping him.
“[The Rebels are] in hand-to-hand combat with [Kiffin and LSU],” one Ole Miss source said.