Lane Kiffin Shades NCAA over Lack of Men's CBB Players Participating in Senior Nights

LSU head football coach Lane Kiffin threw some shade at the NCAA over the transfer portal system that has led to a small number of scholarship basketball players taking part in senior night festivities with the school they originally signed up to play for.

In a post on X, Kiffin tagged the NCAA with the caption "what a great system we have now" in response to a post highlighting there will only 22 high-major scholarship players celebrating senior night events this week who played their entire college career at one school.

The transfer portal, which was adopted by the NCAA in 2018, has been compared to the Wild West because of how chaotic it gets every single year in trying to keep track of everyone who is moving or at least thinks about moving.

At the start of the 2024-25 college basketball season, there were 19,275 men's players on a roster throughout the country. ESPN's Jeff Borzello noted in October 2025 that nearly 2,700 players entered the transfer portal during the offseason, more than 100 players entered the NBA draft and "dozens" of high school seniors flipped their commitments after roster additions or coaching changes.

If you assume those numbers represent something close to the yearly average transfer portal figures, that amounts to more than 10,800 players transferring over a four-year span that typically covers a student-athletes entire college career.

Kiffin is right that it's not a great system, but it is one that gives players a freedom similar to what he has enjoyed as a coach to negotiate for more money and better deals from his university or another school.