The college football calendar has come under intense scrutiny in recent days after new LSU coach Lane Kiffin blamed it for the timing of his departure from the Ole Miss Rebels to take on the Tigers’ job.
During his introductory news conference as LSU coach, Kiffin had blamed the calendar for the timing of his acrimonious exit from the 11-1 Rebels. In light of the same, Texas Tech coach Joey McGuire gave his take on the college football calendar.
Joey McGuire Rails Against College Football Calendar Mess
During his weekly news conference ahead of the No. 4 Texas Tech Red Raiders’ Big 12 championship game against the No. 11 BYU Cougars, coach Joey McGuire railed against the calendar as well. He suggested moving the national championship game to allow the transfer portal to open at the true end of the season.
“I don’t want the portal in the spring,” McGuire said. “I want to know what my team is in January so I can create my team…and so you’re just putting a band-aid over the problem until we address the calendar.”
“So in my opinion, we all should have played on August 23rd,” he added. “Instead of Week 0, we play. That’s Week 1. That would mean with the byes and everything, the conference championships would have been played over Thanksgiving.”
McGuire further called for strict penalties for coaches moving during the season and suggested penalizing teams for such moves. “Nobody from your past team or your team that you’re coaching at can go to the team that you’re going to,” he remarked. “They can get in the transfer portal. But they’ve got to go somewhere else.”
College football coaches around the country voted via the American Football Coaches Association for the early signing period to be in December and for the two-week transfer portal to be in January (2-16).
During Tuesday’s segment of “Trojans Live,” USC Trojans coach Lincoln Riley also emphasized the need to move the dates for several College Football Playoff matchups to fix the calendar issues.
“There’s only in my opinion one way to fix all of this. You got to have the national championship game somewhere around Christmas to New Year’s,” Riley said. “That’s the only way it’s going to work because you got three things that are competing right now.”
“You got to move the national championship game and make adjustments to a season to be able to play out a full season and or do you reduce games? You’re going to always sacrifice something until that happens and that’ll be for the decision makers to make.”
Previously, National Signing Day fell in February, and there were two transfer portal windows (December and April), a loophole that was quickly closed down in an ever-shifting college football calendar.
