OXFORD, Miss. — Let’s get this out of the way first:

Lane Kiffin knows his team’s home loss in late September was a resume-killer, one that eliminated most all of Ole Miss’ margin for error. He’s owned that repeatedly, saying his Rebels “screwed up” the final minutes of that 20-17 loss to a Kentucky team that finished the season 1-7 in the Southeastern Conference.

Kiffin has acknowledged that the Rebels weren’t quite good enough up front on offense and could’ve used a big running back — Ohio State took Quinshon Judkins in the transfer portal back in January and Ole Miss didn’t sufficiently replace him, despite its best efforts — to get a tough yard here and there in narrow losses to Kentucky, LSU and Florida.

However, Kiffin’s argument that his Rebels belong in the 12-team College Football Playoff has a ton of merit otherwise. The Rebels beat Georgia by 18 points, won at South Carolina by 24, won at Arkansas by 32, beat Oklahoma and Mississippi State by 12 each and boat-raced Wake Forest in Winston-Salem. If metrics such as SP+ and game control are factored in, Ole Miss is a top-six team.

On Wednesday, as Kiffin and his staff put the bow on a recruiting class that ranked 14th nationally per Rivals as of this writing, Kiffin was looking ahead, knowing that the shifting landscape of college football combined with the current playoff selection format is going to lead to inevitable encores of the predicament facing two — and maybe three — SEC teams now.

In short, a league that already cannibalizes itself is about to get even tougher.

“Get ready for a giant free agency all over the country,” Kiffin said.

Revenue sharing in college athletics is imminent, and even though those funds won’t be available to distribute to players until July 1, some programs are already preparing to spend that money starting next week when the tampering portal gives way to the official open of the transfer portal.

“I think you’re going to see outrageous prices in this portal,” Kiffin said, adding that he believes players all over the country who weren’t thinking about entering the portal will do so when they hear numbers.

“They may be perfectly happy where they are. They’re going in,” Kiffin said, opining that the market is going to bear “numbers no one’s ever heard of for players that haven’t even been great players.”

Then Kiffin issued a word of caution to fans all over the SEC.

“Don’t think this is the NFL where there’s a cap and there’s revenue sharing and everyone’s equal,” Kiffin said. “That’s not what’s happening. It just sounded good to people when they presented it.”

Kiffin didn’t intend to talk about the College Football Playoffs on Wednesday. He intended to talk about Caleb Cunningham, Shekai Mills-Knight, Andrew Maddox, Maison Dunn, Tyler Lockhart and the rest of a star-studded signing class. In five years, Kiffin has turned Ole Miss into an elite program, one that is a bowl win away from its third 10-win season in the past four years. Among SEC programs, only Alabama and Georgia have won more consistently at Ole Miss since Kiffin left FAU for Oxford.

But Kiffin isn’t naive. And he’s not blind, either. He knows the league is only to going to get more difficult. This season alone, Alabama lost at Vanderbilt, Tennessee lost at Arkansas, LSU lost at Texas A&M and Texas A&M lost at South Carolina. On the penultimate weekend of the season, Kiffin’s Rebels lost at Florida. Hours later, Alabama lost at Oklahoma and Texas A&M fell at Auburn.

And all of that chaos came before revenue sharing kicks in. Call the number, just for the sake of easy math, $20 million per team in revenue sharing. In the SEC, the number won’t stop there. Collectives will still do their things. Individual donors — Kiffin pointed out Barstool’s Dave Portnoy basically buying quarterback Bryce Underwood for Michigan — will go above and beyond collectives. In the Big Ten, a handful of programs will be willing to pay revenue sharing plus more. In the SEC, that will be commonplace.

Take a look at the landscape. Ole Miss is all-in thanks to The Grove Collective and Kiffin’s steady pushing of the fanbase. It’s far from alone. Georgia, Alabama, Auburn, Texas, Texas A&M, LSU, Florida, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Missouri are fully engaged in NIL. Arkansas knows it’s behind and that’s Step 1 in catching up. Kentucky, like Arkansas, is all-in for basketball. Even Vanderbilt is making strides.

“I think this is what you’re going to have to get used to as fans — teams having multiple losses this conference,” Kiffin said.

Kiffin playfully said I had tricked him into a CFP answer. That wasn’t the intention. The 2024 CFP debate is basically over, but it’s not difficult to see how we’ll all be repeating this again in 11-plus months. I was wondering if he felt more parity moving forward would lead to more SEC disappointment when the final CFP bracket is released in future years.

“It’s just different,” Kiffin said, referring to the SEC. “It’s totally different. These comparisons of other conferences, the ACC and the Big 12, you might as well be in different leagues, not conferences. Different leagues. Here’s the NFL. Here’s the SEC. Here’s those few Big Ten teams and then here’s everybody else.”

Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC fans don’t like Kiffin’s argument. The national media — those who feel they have some unspoken charge to protect the game — hates it. But he’s right.

“It’s a bad system,” Kiffin said, referring to the CFP selection process. On Wednesday, he saw a list of the people on the committee and wondered why the committee didn’t have more people who had coached in the Deep South and played in Tiger Stadium or The Swamp or Bryant-Denny or Jordan-Hare or Sanford or Neyland.

“How do they even know what it’s like to have to go win in these stadiums and these places on the road?” Kiffin said. “It’s much different than where these other conferences go and play there 5-5 teams that they have to go play. It’s totally different. And you have to get up for it every week. It’s a lot easier when you’ve got to get up for two games a year.”

So, I asked later, who should be on the committee. Kiffin had an answer queued up.

“Nick Saban and Steve Spurrier,” Kiffin said. “How Nick Saban’s not the head of this committee, compared to an athletic director and what an athletic director knows about football and where to play and what rosters look like compared to Nick Saban…

“I didn’t even know until today who was on the committee until I asked and looked and it makes more sense than ever why they don’t know what they’re doing.”

Kiffin said he knew immediately when he first heard about the current CFP format there was a real possibility the 11th- and 12th-ranked teams would be left out of the field.

“As soon as it came out, I said that’s a dumb system,” Kiffin said. “That just doesn’t make any sense.”

Kiffin said Wednesday he’s for a system where qualified people pick the best 12 or 16 teams and play it out. He knows once revenue sharing kicks in, SEC rosters are going to be stacked. More parity equals more losses, and if there’s not a committee in place that understands that, fewer league teams are going to make it to the playoffs.

Ole Miss happens to be a victim this year, but Kiffin’s comments Wednesday were forward-thinking. Next season, Ole Miss travels to Athens and Norman, in addition to an early-season trip to Lexington and a late November date in Starkville.

Kiffin’s staff has accumulated statistical data regarding the difficulty of winning on the road in the SEC, especially at night.

“It is mind-blowing almost every team — Florida, Texas A&M, Auburn, all these teams that have electric atmospheres — their home and road is a completely different record” Kiffin said. “If you go at night, it’s completely different. These places are hard to win, man. It’s just a different feel. You get to those fourth quarters and we study quarterbacks in fourth quarters on the road and it happens all the time to these people. It’s just different. You have to account almost every week for it.”

The SEC loves its slogan, “It Just Means More.” And it does. Of course more, moving forward, is going to mean more money, more talented players and more dangerous teams. That’s inevitable. The best players are going to pursue the most money and the best opportunities to impress the NFL. There won’t be anything resembling an easy Saturday in the SEC.

That’s going to mean more losses and more fan angst unless the league heeds Kiffin’s warning and starts insisting that the CFP add some measure that truly weighs level of difficulty.

On Wednesday, even as he fought the good fight on social media, Kiffin seemed to have accepted his team’s fate. He’ll be on the road this weekend reloading his roster for 2025 while Texas and Georgia meet in Atlanta for a bye to the national quarterfinals.

Kiffin wasn’t claiming to be a victim Wednesday, even though he clearly believes his team not only belongs in the CFP but could do damage in it. Instead, Kiffin was pointing out a flawed selection system and offering an easy fix. The sport might be wise to listen.