After Deion Sanders' salary cap proposal, Lane Kiffin pinpoints major flaws in the system with a harsh reality check

Lane Kiffin has been one of the coaches who has been vocal on the impact of NIL in the world of collegiate athletics. Student-athletes getting the opportunity to be rewarded for their athletic prowess has led to many controversial changes in the landscape over the years.

During his session at the SEC media days on Monday, the Ole Miss coach was questioned about the possibility of a salary cap in college football, an idea suggested by Deion Sanders at the SEC media days. While Kiffin acknowledges that's the goal of the revenue-sharing, he calls for more clarity.

“I think that’s what we attempted. Doesn’t seem like that’s working very well,” Lane Kiffin said. “So yeah, I mean, stating the obvious. That was the intention of what was going on because there were so many complaints when NIL started.

“Everybody has different advantages and different payrolls. Saw those a couple of years ago. I was up here at one of these joking about a luxury tax based on A&M’s spending or whatever it was. So that was supposed to be being fix, and now it’s not.

The House settlement establishes a cap set at $20.5 million for revenue-sharing directly from schools. Third-party NIL deals exceeding $600 will be reviewed by NIL Go, the Deloitte-managed clearinghouse. While there seem to be enough regulations, Lane Kiffin believes the cap won't do much.

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Lane Kiffin believes schools will go above the cap

Since the advent of NIL in college football, a lot of rules set to regulate it have been broken or easily navigated by the schools. With the cap already in place in the landscape after the dawn of revenue, Lane Kiffin believes many schools will go above the $20.5 million.

“We get a lot of questions like, what’s it like now?” Kiffin said. “We’ve been operating – we have – under these cap guidelines of what was coming and what it was going look like. I think we’ve done a really good job of that.

“Obviously, it means you can’t sign as many players as you would like at times because you have a budget. So we’re obviously hopeful that will be rewarded by doing that. I think it’s obvious people aren’t staying within that cap, so I think the whole thing will be, what does that look like? That’s what we don’t know.”

The first payment of the revenue-sharing era was distributed earlier this month, marking a transition to a new dispensation in the landscape. The $20.5 million cap is, however, set to increase by approximately 4% annually, reaching a projected $32.9 million by 2034-35.