Lane Kiffin bashes ‘even worse’ CFP calendar for next 2 seasons following schedule announcement
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Lane Kiffin was at it again on Tuesday afternoon, taking to his social media account to rant.
This time, it wasn’t a player or a program that Kiffin was targeting but rather a schedule — the College Football Playoff schedule, with the dates for the quarterfinals and semifinals for the next 2 seasons being revealed earlier Tuesday.
Those fresh Playoff dates that are now out in the open for the 2026 and 2027 seasons contained a noticeable difference from this past season. And that was the huge gap in the calendar between the quarterfinal and semifinal matchups, with the 4 survivors into the semis not playing until about 2 weeks after their quarterfinal victories.
For some context, the quarterfinals this past season were on Dec. 31 and Jan. 1, and the semifinal showdowns were staged about a week later on Jan. 8 and 9. Now, in Kiffin’s social media rant, he was a little off, writing that players “have almost a month between the games?!?!” That’s not quite the case, because he was responding to a post by college football analyst Josh Pate that pointed to the large gap between the quarterfinals and the title game, not realizing at that moment that the semis were of course in between.
But Kiffin was right about the season extending into late January now after the semifinals for the 2026 season are played on Jan. 14 and Jan. 15.
“Somehow the calendar got even worse on purpose,” wrote Lane Kiffin.
While Kiffin’s Tuesday rant was a little off base factually, his point about the season dragging on into late January was right on, and now there is a bigger gap between the quarterfinals and semifinals than there has been, which in turn is pushing back the championship game.
Reaction is sure to be rampant on this in the coming days and weeks, and naturally the LSU head coach was at the center of it all in the immediate aftermath.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
