3 Reasons LSU Football Operates Like an NFL Team Under Lane Kiffin

As LSU football enters the Lane Kiffin era, it welcomes the broader college football era as well. This era is defined by NIL’s influence in college football’s ever-increasing similarity to the NFL.

For college football, the NIL aspect of recruiting and the transfer portal is huge, but it has also shaped the way staffs are assembled and operated - possibly LSU’s biggest adjustment.

Kiffin hasn’t waited for that change to come; instead, he’s been ahead of it. He built an entire philosophy around it, and when LSU came calling in December 2025, he brought that philosophy to the most talent-rich address in the SEC.

Building His First Roster

LSU new head coach Lane Kiffin speaks at South Stadium Club at Tiger Stadium. | Matthew Hinton-Imagn Images

Kiffin has said time and time again that his roster situation at LSU was more like an expansion team in a professional league than a transfer portal class.

That’s because of the large overturn from LSU’s 2025 roster to the 2026 roster. Kiffin needed over 40 new players from the transfer portal and an additional 16 more in the recruiting class.

Per the College Front Office’s report on teams’ costs, LSU’s total 2026 roster valuation sits at $42.84 million across 72 players, with roughly 60% of that value - $26.13 million - coming from transfer portal additions.

LSU retained $12.59 million worth of talent and added another $4.12 million through recruits.

It’s slowly inching towards needing a salary cap and regulation on paying athletes. Sounds like the NFL, doesn’t it?

It sure does, that’s what Kiffin thinks at least.

“As you remake your rosters each year …that’s kind of the way to look at it now — almost if you were in the NFL and you took the draft class and then free agency, if they were the same time of year, and you looked at them together,” Kiffin said.

The Pay to Play Mentality

In the NIL era, the conventional philosophy has been that paying players creates complacency. Kiffin - and his staff - are deliberately engineering against that assumption.

At his introductory press conference as LSU’s head coach, he made it clear to donors, media and fans how the money he’s given for a roster will be distributed.

“This salary is for the work you’re supposed to do,” Kiffin said. “You’ve got to go earn this every month and that’s why you’re here and that’s the way I try to get them to look at it.”

He added that it’s the same mentality for his staff.

“Where’s the production? If you go get a staff and pay them what you do, you expect a lot,” Kiffin said. No different than these players that sit in here.”

“You guys may have these salaries, but don’t sit around and think, ‘Okay, well, you have this salary for this coming year, because of what you did before,’” Kiffin said. “Just because you were this good player before, or you coached these players last year is not it. This salary is for the work you’re supposed to do.”

This is professional accountability.

But he took his NFL comparisons to another level, saying that there are also roster construction tradeoffs that professional front offices deal with.

“You invest so much money into the players’ positions, like the NFL, and your rosters aren’t as deep,” Kiffin said. “That’s just the system that’s been created by NIL and the transfer portal. Dynasties that you used to see I don’t think are going to take place as far as the dominant dynasty teams because you can’t make a roster that deep because they won’t stay.”

The General Manager Trend

One of the most significant shifts in how college programs now operate is the rise of the general manager. Kiffin didn’t invent the role, but he’s been one of its most vocal champions recently.

Kiffin took general manager Billy Glasscock and senior director of player personnel Mike Williams to LSU. These two are who he credits as being the instrumental pieces in landing the No. 1 portal class this offseason.

That personnel structure is borrowed directly from the NFL, where front office executives and scouts do the talent identification work that frees coaches to coach.

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