The First Pages

Introduction

Pandora's Box.

College football has always captivated us with a beauty that rivals Pandora herself. Its traditions, pageantry, and raw emotion offer an allure that feels almost otherworldly. Like Pandora in the Greek myth, whose elegance was matched only by her capacity to tempt fate, College Football's charm has drawn millions into its orbit, creating a cultural phenomenon unlike any other. For decades, its purity—rooted in amateurism, community, and the idea that the game was bigger than any player or coach—was its greatest virtue. College football wasn’t just a sport; it was an ideal.

Yet, the lid on Pandora’s Box was never sealed as tightly as we once believed. Beneath the surface, forces were gathering and waiting for the right moment to break free. The sanctity of amateurism cracked under the pressure of billion-dollar television contracts, the transfer portal upended notions of loyalty, and player payments blurred the lines between athlete and professional. What had been a controlled spectacle became an unpredictable force, reshaping the game before our eyes.

For some, this was nothing short of sacrilege, the end of the game as they knew it. The purity they cherished seemed lost, replaced by the mercenary forces of commerce and worth. College football, many argued, had traded its soul for the siren call of progress. The old structures groaned under the weight of change, but were they truly breaking apart—or merely evolving?

And yet, as we stand at this moment in time, surveying the game in its reshaped form, the story feels unfinished. Pandora’s Box did not contain only chaos. Just as it once held one final element — hope — perhaps the game of College Football, too, still has something redemptive to offer. If destruction is inevitable, so too is reinvention. Could this new era carry with it the seeds of a future where the beauty of the sport is not only preserved but strengthened?

We may have unleashed chaos, but maybe, just maybe, this is the moment before renewal.

I am just a College Football fan—probably just like you since you are reading this book. My past colors my expectations of the current state of the game. My past is tied up in the purgatory of Ole Miss football. My past also led me to fall in love with soccer. In what sometimes rivals College Football as my favorite sport to waste time with, I have found myself led down the rabbit hole of what the world calls 'the beautiful game'.

The more I learned about soccer's origins, the business of the world's most popular game, the stories of the players, clubs, and owners, and that game's winding path through history, the more I began to see the similarities between soccer and College Football's past, present, and potential future. This book explores soccer and College Football through the lens of my fandom. Understanding both games' shared pasts will help us understand how we came to the 'now' of College Football. 

The 'now' of College Football ventures into swirling controversies, leaving College Football originalists howling for a return to the good old days—a time before Pandora's box was opened, unleashing the chaos of player payments and the transfer portal. Suppose we can come to the conclusion that the 'now' of College Football is not chaos but rather an opportunity for a reimagining of how the game looks in the future. In that case, we can allow ourselves to forge a new 'future' for College Football.

That new future for College Football can also be shaped by its entire past. That is what I am attempting to do here: imagine a future that re-harnesses the hope we all found in America's version of the beautiful game. That history extends all the way back to the earliest origins of the game. The future is shaped by the most recent stories of chaos and disruption. The future will look different, but, most certainly, the same.

Pandora's Box has been opened. We start our journey to the 'future' of College Football in Purgatory.

Welcome to Purgatory.

I am from the Southeastern part of the United States, born near the Gulf of Mexico in Mississippi and raised in Alabama. Where I come from, few know much about football. Well, what the rest of the world calls football. 

What we know is this: College Football.

A lowly Ole Miss fan during the doldrums of the 1990s, I survived on my father's tales of the good old days of Archie Manning nearly winning the Heisman or backup Tim Ellis coming off the bench to beat Notre Dame in Jackson. Joe Montana, he would say, sat on the bench for the Fighting Irish that day and the Rebels held off the eventual National Champions to win, 20-13. My dad was there in Jackson's Memorial Stadium to watch it unfold. He never filled in how the rest of that season went, and it was best not to ask.

Those days were gone by the time of my childhood.

In 1994, the NCAA put Ole Miss on the staunchest sanctions since SMU's Pony Express scandal. Between the scholarship reductions, the post-season bowl ban, and the ban from appearing on television (the last team to receive that punishment), Ole Miss during my formative years was downright pitiful. It was a tough spot to be in when your family had moved to Alabama during the second coming of Alabama Football. Between the Crimson Tide and the Auburn Tigers, my 'wear-your-favorite-college -team-t-shirt-to-school' day was always a pain in the ass.

"I know," I would say, "we suck."

The good news, however, was that College Football was still somewhat of a niche television sport in the early 1990s. I couldn't watch the Rebels in 1994 because of NCAA sanctions. But, when they eventually returned to the tube, they were on Jefferson Pilot for almost every game—if you don't know what that means, consider yourself lucky. Only one team had every game broadcasted nationally in those days, Notre Dame on NBC, and ESPN was still on its fast march out of being a regional sports show in Connecticut. Fridays, not Saturdays, were always a bigger deal in Mobile, Alabama, at least for me.

The weekends were for soccer, or football, as the rest of the world calls it. Not watching it, obviously, but rather playing it. Soccer wasn't the biggest sport in Mobile. High school football held that crown. Behind that were baseball and basketball. Shoot, even when I was watching ProStars on Saturday mornings, the animated show that featured Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson (an Auburn star) as superheroes, Wayne Gretzky was the third superhero athlete. A damn hockey player!

I loved playing soccer, and I played until, as I like to put it, my athleticism failed me. As I traded my soccer cleats for a tennis racquet and golf clubs, something bigger was happening nationwide in the United States. Professional soccer made its debut. The 1994 World Cup prompted the formation of Major League Soccer in the United States. I remember tuning in with millions more to watch soccer for the first time on my television in Alabama. Soccer hooked me as I watched Brazil beat the Azzurri Italians in penalties to lift the World Cup trophy in the Rose Bowl.

When the World Cup ended and we returned to our regular programming, ABC was starting to show MLS games, and as I was finishing up high school, I got my first Chicago Fire jersey and caught Fire games when I could. Also, on those weekends, the SEC on CBS began elevating College Football in the Southeast United States as that league expanded to twelve teams, adding Arkansas and South Carolina to an already rabid and growing sport in the South. 

By the time I left Mobile to go to Ole Miss, College Football was a Saturday staple in almost every Southern household. If you weren't making your way to double or quadruple the population of a quaint and quiet college town, you tuned in on CBS for the big games and Jefferson Pilot for the other matchups. Featured games were at two thirty in the afternoon, and you knew it was time when you heard the opening tune: "Duh-duh, duh-duh-duh, dah-dah! Duh-duh, duh-duh-duh, dah-dah!"

My time at Ole Miss was much different than my fandom during my Mobile years. Ole Miss was good and getting better! Eli Manning, the third son of Archie Manning, the greatest quarterback to ever put on the red and blue in Oxford, the brother of Peyton Manning, who was leaving Tennessee Orange to play in the NFL for the Indianapolis Colts, was taking over the offense and breaking records. We even beat Bama and Auburn a few times during those years. But, I left Vaught Hemingway stadium with bourbon-soaked tears when Doug Buckles, Ole Miss's center, stepped on Eli's foot on fourth down, ending our last-ditch drive to beat LSU with the SEC West on the line. 

A trip to Atlanta to play for the championship of what was becoming College Football's best league had to wait. And wait. And wait. And wait.

Ole Miss fell right off a cliff the year after Eli left. The only championships we could claim were the Super Bowl trophies that Eli went on to win as the quarterback for the New York Giants. I eventually found and married an Auburn girl from Mississippi. She got her law degree from Ole Miss, and her family, despite allowing her to go to Auburn, all were Ole Miss fans or alums themselves. Having a semi-Rebel family made Thanksgiving bearable as ESPN forced us to ruin a day of thanks every year with the Egg Bowl, the end-of-the-year in-state rivalry game between Ole Miss and Mississippi State. I don't know if I could have handled doing that day with 'State' in-laws like my brother-in-law did and still does. While we love our family the rest of the year, Turkey Day could be slightly toxic in Mississippi.

It became especially toxic when Ole Miss hired an up-and-coming coach from Arkansas State. A Mississippi native, Hugh Freeze, brought a bible (and a bag of cash, according to Mississippi State fans) to the parents of the best players across the country. Mississippi State's carpet-bagger of a coach, Dan Mullen, spiced the rivalry up even more by refusing to say Ole Miss's name, only referring to us as 'The School Up North' or 'TSUN'. The rivalry crescendoed when the two Mississippi schools were featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated and were the #1 (State) and #3 (Ole Miss) teams in the first-ever College Football Playoff rankings in 2014 under the title 'MISSISSIPPI MAYHEM'.

Both teams faltered down the stretch, but both managed to make consolation 'New Year's Six' bowl games that year.

And if the SI cover was the crescendo of the rivalry, the climax was the implosion of Hugh Freeze's program. As rival fans continuously insisted Freeze's rise was due to cheating, he tweeted out a special email address for rival fans to send proof. The NCAA took Freeze's tweet as a challenge to prove he had been paying his players, and the governing body of College Football accepted the invitation, set up shop in Oxford, and searched and scoured for proof. They eventually found around $13,000 in improper benefits paid to players on Freeze's teams, including placing a nominal value on allowing a recruit to sleep on assistant coach Chris Kiffin's couch for a night like it was a five-star hotel. It turned out to be nothing like the outright cheating they alleged. Remarkably enough, it was not the NCAA but a zealous Mississippi State beat writer who brought down Freeze when he FOIA'd the coach's university-owned phone records and discovered that he had been calling massage parlors.

Ole Miss fired Freeze, and the Florida Gators hired State's Mullen away. The mayhem was over, and the Mississippi schools both found themselves searching for a route back to relevance.

A few miserable years later, at the end of a season that saw my Rebels win only four games and only two in the SEC, Ole Miss's electric wideout Elijah Moore caught a pass that nearly leveled the score of the still-toxic Egg Bowl. Moore proceeded to drop to all fours, lift one leg, and pretend to urinate on State's field like a dog. A yellow flag flew and backed up Ole Miss on the ensuing extra point. Ole Miss missed the kick and lost the game by that one point.

That three-legged spectacle, it turns out, sparked the beginning of a new College Football future, and not just for Ole Miss.

The Prophecy.

All that was needed was a spark to ignite the fire. The kindling had been accumulating beneath the surface of College Football, waiting to explode into open flames. When it did it raged, and it consumed the old assumptions and illuminated a new reality. But fire alone is never just the beginning or the end of any story. It is what follows in its wake that determines whether the world is reshaped or left in ruin. 

Fire can be cleansing.

As punishment for those who dared to play with fire, the Greek myth says Zeus gave the world the irresistible Pandora. Humanity would never be the same because we could not control our own curiosities and desires for more. The ugly underbelly of life was once contained and it was suddenly unleashed when we opened Pandora's Box. 

Faced with a new reality, there is no turning back. 

The forces of change in College Football, like the elements within Pandora’s Box, seeped out from the shadows and now swirl through the game forever altering its landscape. The old ways were questioned, and, with the questions, the illusion of control was shattered.

Yet the fire has already been stolen. Prometheus, once aligned with Zeus, played a crucial role in shaping their new world. Like the NCAA and the conferences, Prometheus mediated between power and the people, negotiating humanity's terms of existence. He gave fire to the people, much as the NCAA and the conferences set the framework for College Football’s rise.

Yet, Prometheus overreached. Fire was a blessing, but also a disruption. The NCAA and the conferences, in their governance, created mechanisms that now challenge their own control. Their hubris and recklessness gave athletes what they deserved—more ownership— but also unprecedented and irresponsible mobility and power. Their governing actions, whether made with good intentions or under duress, came too late, too haphazardly—and they sparked chaos.

For his defiance, Prometheus was chained to a rock, his power diminished, left to suffer as his punishment stretched on for eternity. Though, even in captivity, Prometheus attempted to undercut fate by uttering a prophecy that would shake the foundations of power. He foresaw that Zeus’s rule, much like College Football's future, was not an inevitability. 

Prometheus prophesied both the downfall of Zeus and, ironically, his own. Those who failed to adapt, he predicted, would fall—god or not. Likewise, the NCAA and the conferences, once unquestioned in their authority, now find themselves shackled by the very forces they helped unleash. Their dominance is no longer absolute, and the game they once controlled is slipping beyond their grasp. With fire already in our hands, we must ask—do we even need them?

At this point, it feels as if they have left fans and players in chaos. Maybe it is time to shackle the NCAA and College Football conferences to a rock for eternity. Like Prometheus, they have served their purposes at this point in the arc of College Football history. 

But chaos does not mean the end. Zeus did not fall when he heeded the prophecy of his own demise; he adapted, and so he survived. The NCAA and the conferences, like Prometheus, may have set forces in motion that disrupted their own dominance, but College Football—the essence of the game—endures. The prophecy that the end was here was an illusion. Like Zeus, College Football must now evolve or be left behind.

Zeus survived not by resisting prophecy, but by changing. College football must do the same. The old power structures may be destined to a restrained reality, but the game itself—its passion, its rivalries, its connection to the fans—will live on. The question is not whether College Football can survive, but how it will evolve.

As fans, we set sail between prophecy and hope, uncertain of where the changing tides of College Football will lead. The past cannot be changed, but the future is unwritten. If the NCAA and the conferences no longer dictate the sport’s fate, then who does? The answer lies in adaptation, in the recognition that football, in its purest form, is not beholden to governing bodies—it belongs to the people who love it. It belongs to the fans.

This book is not a prophecy. It is an exploration of what comes next. 

Like Odysseus charting an uncertain course home, College Football finds itself in unfamiliar waters, the old world fading into the past. The sport’s transformation will be guided by those who, like the legendary wanderer, adapt to the storms, embrace reinvention, and find a way forward.

"Oh my God, we may have just gotten fired." - Unknown

Sam Khan, "The Egg Bowl That Cost Two Coaches Their Jobs and Changed College Football Forever." 

The Athletic, 26 Nov. 2020

Life in the Fast Lane

Joey Freshwater.

Joey Freshwater, or so he was called on social media, was a lightning rod of a football coach. The son of one of American football's greatest coaches and the architect of the 'Tampa Two' defensive alignment, Monte Kiffin, Lane Kiffin was seen as a temperate prodigy, an internet troll, and a California playboy. His career had taken an Odyssean journey through the coaching ranks, starting at his alma mater at age 22, Fresno State, where he had been a quarterback.

It only took a few short years, bouncing between a few graduate assistant positions and a year in the NFL as a quality control coach, before Lane landed with future Hall of Fame coach Pete Carroll on his staff at the University of Southern California. Kiffin would flourish under Carroll, winning two BCS National Championships as the team's wide receivers coach and passing game coordinator in 2003 and 2004. In 2005 alongside future Texas Longhorns coach Steve Sarkisian, Kiffin guided the Trojans to a 10-2 record as a co-offensive coordinator with 'Sark'. The Trojans just missed an invitation to play in a third BCS National Championship game when they lost a heartbreaking and head-scratching last game of the season to UCLA.

That's where the roller coaster ride got real for Kiffin. Eccentric NFL owner Al Davis hired the 31-year-old offensive wunderkind to head the Oakland Raiders. Twenty games later, and not solely because he sent Sebastian Janikowski out to attempt a 76-yard field goal, Davis fired Kiffin, whose overall record was 5-15. The firing ended a tumultuous relationship between coach and owner. All was not lost, however, because the Tennessee Volunteers were happy to pick up the castoff and hand him the keys to their slumbering college program. And with some decent results on the field and the recruiting trail, the Vols were very happy with Lane until they weren't.

Mattresses were set ablaze in Knoxville, Tennessee when Kiffin left in the middle of the night to head to his 'dream job' back at USC to replace his mentor Pete Carroll. Carroll was leaving USC under a cloud of NCAA sanctions from improper benefits paid to electric superstar and Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush. Those sanctions proved a hurdle for Kiffin, but his Trojans still went 8-5 and 10-2 in his first two seasons despite being ineligible for postseason play.

Starting the 2012 season, the Trojans topped some preseason polls as the No. 1 team in the country. That year, however, expectations fell woefully short as the Trojans went 7-5 and lost in the Sun Bowl. The following season didn't improve as the Trojans started 3-2. When the team returned from their last blowout loss to Arizona State and landed at LAX, USC Athletic Director Pat Haden would have Kiffin pulled off the team bus on the tarmac and he would fire the coach in a small office in the airport terminal. The meteoric rise of the game's most prolific offensive mind had seemingly burned out.

Luckily for Kiffin, another sure-to-be future Hall of Fame coach grew increasingly frustrated with football's change to a more uptempo passing game from a huddling physical slog. Nick Saban, who had already won four national championships by then, famously started the 'Nick Saban Coaches Recovery Clinic' at Alabama. He controversially picked up Kiffin to come to Tuscaloosa and modernize his offense as the offensive coordinator. Kiffin would be the first of many discarded coaches Saban brought onto his staff during his run as potentially the greatest College Football coach ever—only fellow Bama legend Paul 'Bear' Bryant could fight him for the title.

Kiffin ultimately helped bring Saban's Tide into the modern era of explosive offenses. Alabama's new up-tempo and high-flying offense increased its points per game by an average of three points and yards per game by thirty. During his three-year tenure, the Crimson Tide went 40-4 and won a National Championship, made it to another, and a semifinal in the third. Running back Derrick Henry won the Heisman Trophy, and Amari Cooper, a wideout, made it to New York for the trophy ceremony. Despite an animated relationship between Saban and Kiffin that was often caught on sideline video, Saban's gamble to bring Kiffin in paid off. In the years after Lane left Tuscaloosa, the new offense he installed finished in the top three in scoring offense for the country each year. Alabama was flying.

However, the Lane Train roller coaster was still mid-ride, and the coarse relationship between the two men with seemingly adverse personalities finally rubbed the wrong way. Saban fired Kiffin after winning the 2017 national semifinal game. Kiffin was itching to take back over his own program and had been flirting with Florida Atlantic University to become their next head coach. It was too much for the process-oriented Saban, so much so that he would rather play the biggest game of the year without his offensive coordinator.

Saban fired Kiffin and promoted Offensive Analyst Steve Sarkesian to Coordinator. Lane's old running mate from USC and newest member of the Saban Clinic would lose the national championship game to Clemson, though the offense was not the problem. While Kiffin's offense in Tuscaloosa kept flying, the Lane Train would chug on toward Boca.

A Pro-Mindset.

No one wearing a headset on Thanksgiving night 2019 can pinpoint exactly who predicted that the whole staff would be getting fired. Still, everyone heard it, according to an article about the coaching carousel butterfly effect set off by Elijah Moore's dog-peeing celebration to cap off the Egg Bowl. The Athletic article, written one year later, would count around 300 coaching moves - firings, hirings, transfers, etc. - resulting from that one penalty.

The Ole Miss staff, including head coach Matt Luke, were the first dominoes to fall. Many more assistants, coordinators, and head coaches, including the winning coach from the Egg Bowl, Joe Moorehead, were out of jobs over the next several months. However, none may have been more significant than the first one. As Ole Miss moved on from Matt Luke, they quickly evaluated available coaches. New Athletic Director Keith Carter settled on a figure that split the Rebel faithful in their feelings for his decision.

Carter zeroed in on Boca Raton, Florida for the next head coach, where Lane Kiffin had gone 26-13 in three seasons with Florida Atlantic University. He led the Owls to be Conference USA Champions in 2017 and 2019. Kiffin sent CUSA MVP Devin Singletary on to star in the NFL, and his tight end in 2019, Harrison Bryant, won the Mackey Award for the nation's top tight end.

The Ole Miss media machine cranked up to bring the whole fanbase onto the Lane Train. Gifs of trains, conductors, and Baby Yodas were flying around social media. Ole Miss was making a splash, and Kiffin was back in a big-time league. He deboarded the University's private plane in Oxford, where a large crowd gathered awaiting his arrival, and a baby was shoved into his arms. As he settled in, he came bearing a message.

In his opening press conference, Kiffin was officially introduced to the Rebel fanbase in Ole Miss's sparkling new basketball arena. The administration talked about finding a coach with a proven record of success, someone who understood the pressure of the SEC and had the leadership ability to excite the fans. Wearing the uniform of uninitiated fraternity pledges, Lane looked the part in his navy blazer, khaki pants, and red-and-blue striped tie.

Kiffin stepped to the podium, where he began by thanking his legendary father, his kids who sat behind him on stage, the administration, and the fans. Then, he got to the point. "We didn't come here to be good," Kiffin told the gathered fans and players. "Alright, that's not why we are here today. We came here to be great." And the crowd ate it up because that's what fans do when feasting on hope. But, in retrospect, what came next would be Kiffin's premonition of the future of College Football.

"This program will be built on old school principles, okay, with a new school mindset on how to do that. So that combination of a new way of thinking, we don't just do things that way because they have been done that way. We are always evolving, whether it is analytics, technology, recruiting, player development, sports science, game management at the highest level, you know we are always learning, always evolving." The football Kiffin talked about was not your dad's or grandfather's rub-some-dirt-on-it junction boys' brand of football. The next part would push the boundaries of the game past College Football originalists' comfort level.

Kiffin closed his introductory remarks with a call to action for fans, donors, and current and future players. "It's time to get to work," he started. "We need the fans, alumni, former players all united, everyone on the same page, which is to win championships. And last thing, a message to recruits around the country: you know if you want to be featured at the highest level, in the best conference in the world, compete for championships, be completely prepared for the NFL, with a pro mindset, so you can come here and win championships … there is no reason to go anywhere else but come right here to Ole Miss."

What at the time seemed like a bunch of coach-speak included a statement that Ole Miss turned into buttons, t-shirts, and social media fodder: having a 'Pro Mindset'. Even if he didn't mean it to be taken literally, he was suggesting College Football was no longer for amateurs. His team would operate like a professional team, and his players would learn to treat it that way, too. They were taking a job, not an after-school activity.

Within five years of being punished for paying players, Ole Miss' next head coach just gave a speech about being professional. On that day, it was just about the mindset. It wasn't long before his premonition of fans and donors coming together to pay players out in the open was no longer punished but required.

An Uncertain Future

Cardboard Cutouts.

COVID-19 started with a whisper but soon charged like a bull.

The first report of a case of COVID-19 in the United States surfaced in the New York Times and a smattering of other news outlets on January 20, 2020. Just over a month after Ole Miss announced Lane Kiffin as their new head football coach, a 35-year-old man returned to his home state of Washington from a trip to Wuhan, China, eventually the determined epicenter of the viral outbreak. On January 19, he felt symptoms of the virus. On January 20, after visiting an urgent care center, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed his illness was indeed the rapidly spreading virus.

By the end of January, five more cases had been confirmed. In March, the virus exploded, likely due to the mass travel of spring breakers intermixing on beaches and traveling internationally and cross-country. Cases at the end of February in the United States were only 26; by the end of March, there were nearly a quarter of a million confirmed cases. By April, cases had eclipsed a million confirmed; by summer, cases were increasing by millions month-over-month. At the beginning of August, universities across the United States grappled with handling the return to school as confirmed new cases sat at 4.6 million.

Students' health was at the top of action plans for administrators, but the loss of television revenues from College Football games was also pressing university presidents. As the New York Times reported, "The shrinking and fluid schedules are the extraordinary measures being taken to ensure that universities can salvage the lucrative television revenues that, along with an unpaid labor force — the players — fuel the college athletics industrial complex."

In 2019, the year before the outbreak, the SEC collected $720.6 million for broadcast rights, according to the New York Times, which reported on the SEC's decision to push back and shorten its season to only ten intra-conference games. The SEC joined the BIG 10, which was sending the fattest checks to its member schools to a tune of $54 million each that year, and the PAC 12 in trying to salvage the COVID season.

The COVID season would change everything for College Football. 

If Elijah Moore's urination celebration was the Promethean spark that forged Pandora's box, then COVID was the impetus for College Football fans to open it. The formerly repressed and hidden ills that had been building in college athletics were now out for the world to see.

It wasn't just the cardboard cutouts replacing fans in whisper-quiet stadiums or the scramble of last-minute game cancellations due to sudden COVID cases that upended the sport. With no fans filling the cathedrals of College Football on Saturdays, schools were left without a primary revenue source. As schools scrambled to figure out how to fill the massive hole in their budgets, it became clear that COVID would knock out live fans, and schools would rely on players' performances being broadcast into millions of living rooms for survival. COVID highlighted the precarious position of the players: players were 'just' students, but they were also essential workers in an industry responsible for propping up educational institutions across the country.

The strange myth of the 'college athlete' perpetuated by the NCAA and college sports for so long was being laid bare by the global pandemic. These students were not just students at these universities. They were so much more important. They were 'frontline workers' of the pandemic whose work necessitated their emergence from quarantine to do their jobs as football players. The show had to go on if the money train was to keep on rolling. The schools had contractual obligations to meet and their unpaid workforce had a job to do.

As it would turn out, student-athletes weren't just passengers in College Football anymore. What COVID did was propel a long-held but fringe view that athletes were employees and not just students into the mainstream. Football players were now driving the train, and the ride was picking up steam. 

The Lane Train Rebels left the station and finished the 2020 COVID season with a 5-5 record, including a win over the No. 11 ranked Indiana Hoosiers in the Outback Bowl. The .500 record made sense as Ole Miss finished the season as the third-ranked team in total offense at 555.5 yards per game and the country's 117th (out of 128) ranked defense.

With the strange and uncertain season over, Alabama claimed victory over Ohio State in the championship game. Everyone hoped the COVID season would remain in the rearview mirror. On a national and team-by-team level, it was time to move on. For Ole Miss, it was clear that Kiffin could still coach offense. Now it was time for him to beef up a defense that couldn't catch the flu.

The Portal King.

On January 31, 2022, Lane Kiffin went to Twitter to post a doctored photo of his face on the body of Joe Exotic (real name, Joseph Maldonado), the central figure of Netflix COVID-viral show Tiger King about a flamboyant and eccentric former zoo owner obsessed with fame and controversy. Kiffin, eh… Joe Exotic, had his arms around a tiger with the word 'portal' over its face and the caption "#PortalKing 😂 😂🧩🧩."

Fans eagerly embraced the puzzle pieces Kiffin hinted at because they were wondering how Ole Miss was going to respond to their 2021-2022 season, where they watched their Rebels finish the season 10-2, including a heart-wrenching loss in the Sugar Bowl. The Rebels' late-season Heisman candidate Matt Corral went out in the first quarter with a leg injury that probably sealed the Rebels' Sugar Bowl dreams. Heading into the next season, the Lane Train was losing a number of its key passengers, none more critical than its prolific signal caller Corral.

Kiffin was using Twitter, his favorite social media platform, to announce that he was circling two pieces to the next season's puzzle in the transfer portal. He also unintentionally gave himself the nickname 'The Portal King'. 

The NCAA created the transfer portal in late 2018 to allow college athletes to explore transfer opportunities without coaches' approval. For the first few years, 'the Portal' was primarily used by graduate students and disgruntled players who needed to get the playing time they thought they deserved. In fact, in the first two years of the transfer portal, only around 1,500 players utilized the Portal in year one, and several hundred more than that in year two.

The 2020-2021 season saw an explosion in the names entered into the Portal, thanks to COVID. Because of the shortened season during the COVID year, the NCAA changed a couple long-standing rules that impacted players' college careers. First, the NCAA granted all athletes affected by the COVID year a one-time extra year of eligibility. Second, the governing body removed for good its rule that required players to sit out a year when transferring from one school to another to play the same sport. The two new NCAA policies transformed athletes' college experiences and how coaches built rosters.

The transfer restriction change came in April 2021, but real gas was poured on the transfer fire in July. That month, the NCAA formally adopted an interim policy allowing players to monetize their Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL). The new NIL rules meant that college athletes could accept money from commercial entities for the first time. Of course, to preserve an illusion of amateurism, the NCAA decreed that NIL payments could not come as a quid pro quo for actually playing the game. In other words, the athlete had to perform some marketable task, and the payment amount had to have a reasonable market value.  

Following the transfer and NIL changes, with financial incentives on the table, the transfer portal soon became a high-stakes market. The NCAA had entered themselves into an unwinnable war. If they thought regulating under-the-table payments to some players was a monumental task, policing a new policy that needed to regulate every payment made to all athletes would surely test their metal. 

No matter what the NCAA thought would happen, the toothpaste was out of the tube. Schools everywhere were jockeying to determine how to take advantage of these new policy changes. The chaos and frenzy even caught the attention of advertisers, with Dr. Pepper airing a "Transfer Portal" commercial that humorously portrayed players entering a futuristic floating portal to find new teams. By the time the Portal 'closed', more than 3,500 players had entered their names, seeking playing time, new opportunities, and often money at a new school.

As teams rushed to adapt to the changes, Lane Kiffin and Ole Miss were on the front foot. They had an unfinished puzzle and Kiffin needed a Watson to help him solve it. 

The Grove Collective.

'The Grove' at Ole Miss is a ten-acre park in the heart of campus. Shaded under the canopy of hundred-year-old oaks, the Grove provides Ole Miss students with a tranquil place to meet, study, or enjoy the beauty of the place during their school days. However, nothing is calm about the Grove on Ole Miss home game weekends.

When I began attending games as a kid, cars had been kicked out of the Grove, where they had pulled in and participated in more traditional 'tailgating' for decades. These days, tents stretch as far as the eye can see, replacing cars for a newer, no-tailgate tailgating experience. When empty, the Grove feels somewhat manageable. You can see clearly across it and wave down a friend on the other side. On game day, it feels vast—like you may never make it across.

Sports Illustrated has called the Grove 'a Cathedral of tailgating,' while Sporting News has dubbed it 'the Holy Grail of tailgating.' And it is no wonder why. When 60,000 plus fans leave the Grove for Vaught Hemingway Stadium on a big game, nearly the same number stay behind under the tents, complete with chandeliers, flat-screen televisions, extravagant catering, and pre-purchased beverages.

After the game, a win will be a cause for celebration and a return to family and friends' tents, always in the same spot - hopefully, thanks to the bourbon. After a loss, you'll still hear murmurs between chicken tenders and a fresh pour from a blue-blazered pledge or a sundressed co-ed claim: "We may not win every game, but we never lose the party."

"We never lose the party." For three decades going into the 2022 football season, I could safely bet that I had heard my dad, or maybe one of his friends, or somebody in the Grove make the claim at least once every season. Shoot, up until 2021, when Ole Miss finished 10-2, there were always five or six opportunities a year to hear it and feel it. 

But under Kiffin, Ole Miss had won 10 games in a season twice now, the second and third time since 1971. They had only lost two regular-season games in two of his three seasons (excluding the COVID year) for the second and third time since 1990. Eli Manning's 2003 team finished the regular season 9-2 and 10-2 after winning the Cotton Bowl.

That was the modern history of Ole Miss, a team that shone in the 1960s and 1970s and had several moments of inspiration since that had yet to be sustained. 

In 2021, Ole Miss fans witnessed something new. Lane Kiffin's Rebels finished 10-3, indicating Kiffin's future potential. But even as excitement built for the 2022 season, a new college sports landscape emerged. Ole Miss would need some direction in the wilderness; that's when a Jackson attorney named William Liston and the Grove Collective stepped up.

When Liston was called to a fundraising meeting in Oxford for the 'Champions Now' capital campaign driven by the University, he was invited as the most knowledgeable person in Mississippi on Name, Image, and Likeness, having serendipitously been brought into the field by star running back Jerrion Ealy in August of 2021. The meeting amongst several attorneys and university fundraisers in October of that same year started to raise capital for the University's campaign. However, after being briefed on the near future of Ole Miss athletics, there was a nagging feeling that the University didn't need the money; some outside organizations did. Liston and another attorney, David Nutt, undertook a new objective: to wrangle NIL for Ole Miss athletics. The group they formed to accomplish this objective was the Grove Collective.

Ole Miss fans were far from the first to form a collective for NIL payments to players; many Power Five fan bases were already organizing groups to manage and distribute funds for NIL deals. These groups went by many names, but the word "collective" seemed to be the en-vogue vehicle for attacking the new NIL world. A collective is typically an independently formed organization of alums, fans, and donors that pools resources to support athletes through endorsement deals, appearances, and other promotional work. The goal of a collective is also to help streamline NIL opportunities by connecting athletes with potential sponsors and orchestrating deals that might otherwise be difficult to arrange individually. As collectives developed, they did so without a map or compass. 

As the men formed the Grove Collective and Liston's wife was fashioning the now ubiquitous oak tree logo, they had to do so without the help of the University. The Grove Collective was confronting the frontier of NIL and collectives. State laws and NCAA rules were vague and full of holes, which proved tricky.  However, the developing regulations also gave Liston and his team room to shape the collective and Mississippi law. They found they could paint the new collective's structure and Mississippi law with the same brush.

In Mississippi, everybody knows everybody, and this is even more pronounced among lawyers. Liston and Nutt used their legal knowledge and network to urge Mississippi to pass the friendliest NIL legislation in the nation, which further unlocked the University's ability to assist in communications with and for the collective. By September 30, 2022, the Grove Collective had relaunched publicly with a press conference on campus leading up to the Rebels beating No. 7 Kentucky just across the Grove in Vaught Hemingway Stadium. The relaunch was the idea of a new director, Walker Jones, a former Under Armour executive and Ole Miss alum. The idea was to consolidate donors from several smaller collectives into the one backed by the University.

The Rebels squandered an 8-1 season start, losing the final four games, including a 42-25 thrashing by Texas Tech in the Texas Bowl. They would finish 8-5 that season. And it didn't seem as if the pain was stopping anytime soon.

The pain didn't really start that season when the then-No. 7 Rebels visited Death Valley in Baton Rouge to play the LSU Tigers. What turned out to be a harbinger for the season to come, Ole Miss held a 20-17 halftime lead but failed to score for the remainder of the game. The Tigers, led by quarterback Jayden Daniels, who a season later would become the 2023 Heisman Trophy winner, posted 28 second-half points. The Rebels limped away disappointed but far from out of a championship posture. 

Instead, the real pain started two weeks after the Rebels had seemingly gotten the season back on track. Ole Miss hosted Alabama and Kiffin's old boss, the man Kiffin later acknowledged resuscitated his career and the one man Kiffin wanted to beat more than anyone. It almost seemed like Lane felt he wouldn't have arrived as an elite coach until he could dispatch the GOAT. He nearly did it, too. Yet, Alabama held on to rebuff a last-minute Rebel drive to give Kiffin's team their second loss of the year. The loss essentially eliminated Ole Miss from the playoffs that season.

While Alabama was eliminating the Rebels from the playoff and were still hunting another National Championship trophy for their trophy cabinet, in Auburn, Alabama they had let go of their head football coach and were a few weeks into a coaching search. While it was undoubtedly tough to see their proud program struggling and Alabama still rolling on, the Bama win held a silver lining for Auburn fans. Ole Miss' elimination from playoff contention gave Auburn officials the green light to start backchanneling with Kiffin's representation to become the Tiger's next ball coach.

The Auburn courtship of Kiffin followed a time-tested model for prying a coach away from another program. First, bulletin board heroes start posting messages about somebody's best friend's aunt's next-door neighbor whose housekeeper also cleans for an assistant coach at the target coach's school. The assistant coach was overheard talking about the head coach leaving. A variation of that message is posted with an ever-increasing frequency. All this 'smoke' must mean there's a fire, which brings in the professionals.

First, the articles are written and published on sites like Saturday Down South. If enough secondary media articles are posted, then ESPN gets involved. Paul Finebaum will take a call about it. Then an article will bubble up on ESPN.com, never confirming anything but fanning the flames. The Kiffin to Auburn rumor fire had reached this point in only one week. 

Seven days after Saban cut short the Rebels' season, Kiffin needed to refocus his team. But while Ole Miss battled a middling Arkansas team on a frozen mid-November field, the ESPN crew, including Auburn alum Cole Cublic, openly speculated about which of the Rebel players Kiffin would take with him to Auburn. The move seemed like a foregone conclusion, as did the football game, which ended in one of the worst performances by a Kiffin team in three seasons. The worst performance would come a week later when Kiffin laid an egg at home in the Egg Bowl to cap the season off with a third straight loss, ending their fall from their Top 10 ranking in mid-October.

Some Ole Miss fans attributed the season's end to the distraction of Auburn's overtures to Kiffin. They had distracted Kiffin, who, in turn, distracted the team. Many in the Auburn faithful will say that Kiffin was never really a target. Others in the media strongly disagree.

While Lane was considering or not considering the Auburn job, the national College Football media was making bold, maybe unsubstantiated claims. Chris Low's boldest claim was that Auburn's NIL fund was ten times the size of Ole Miss' Grove Collective. That was some claim coming from ESPN's mouthpiece for the SEC, true or not. Regardless, statements like Low's create maelstroms of 'our school is better than your school' social media engagements. The Auburn and Ole Miss keyboard warriors had strapped in and were typing into battle. 

Chris Low's statement and resulting internet war of words slapped the Ole Miss faithful into gear. Over the next several days, the Grove Collective reportedly raised over $10 million to spend on players through NIL payments for the 2023 season. Shortly after the collective announced the new capital war chest, Kiffin decided to stay in Oxford. Whether Kiffin was an actual candidate at Auburn was then left as an argument for the history books. 

Chris Low later wrote an article stating that the Kiffin to Auburn was a done deal, but Kiffin's daughter Landry and a cadre of her girlfriends showed her dad a slideshow explaining why he should stay at Ole Miss. The number one reason: Ole Miss was the place Landry now called home as a student. Auburn eventually hired disgraced but born again ex-Ole Miss head coach Hugh Freeze from his redemption tour at Liberty University, the 'Evangelical Notre Dame'.

Some will say that Landry Kiffin's slideshow kept Lane at Ole Miss. Others will say that it was the ten-plus million dollars that flowed into the collective following the Chris Low statements. Auburn message boards would continue to say they wanted Freeze all along. Either way, Kiffin stayed in Oxford and had a fresh arsenal to fight with going into his 2023 season. 

But, before the 2023 season, before NIL or the transfer portal, before Lane Kiffin and even College Football itself, there was another Oxford on the other side of the world. There, in a time long since passed, groups of students passed the time playing a simple game without a name. Before the future of football, there was the history of football. The history of football found ways to raise the game to the heavens. It also found ways to muck it all up. 

Mark Twain once said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes." If we go back to the future to write the next epic chapters, it's best to hop back and learn its rhythms from its past. If we are to go back in time to the era when football's roots intertwined with poetry and progress, we find ourselves in the Time of Tennyson.

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