There’s going to be a ton of bad blood between the Ole Miss Rebels and LSU Tigers moving forward. Perhaps that’s just the price of doing business with Lane Kiffin.
You take the good with the bad. The bad for two former Ole Miss players is apparently potentially winding up in court. According to Sam Hutchens of the Mississippi Clarion Ledger, Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter is considering suing former football players Princewill Umanmielen and Devin Harper. Both players followed Kiffin from Ole Miss to LSU via the transfer portal, but they still owe Ole Miss buyout money.
“That would be an option, going and asking a court to get that money for you,” Carter said. “Contracts are with the players. LSU could pay that on behalf of the players. So we’re kind of exploring all of that right now.”
Both signed revenue-sharing contracts with Ole Miss, and in the case of Umanmielen, he entered the transfer portal after publicly announcing his intention to stay with the Rebels.
A rev-share contract is directly between the school and a player, and they involve buyouts if said player leaves. NIL agreements are different because they’re made with a NIL collective, and they’re technically considered more supplemental in nature.
In this new era of college athletics, each school has $21.3 million in revenue sharing that it can distribute to its college athletes. Obviously, most of that goes to the football program because of its revenue-generating capabilities. Most power conference schools are spending a majority of that “salary cap” on football players.
Princewill Umanmielen and Devin Harper still owe Ole Miss roughly $1 million each
The numbers that Umanmielen and Harper were expected to make in 2026 and what they owe Ole Miss haven’t been disclosed, but On3 is reporting that each player’s buyout is roughly $1 million.
Carter wouldn’t say how much Ole Miss is owed from each player (or from LSU on its behalf), but he did say it was a significant amount because both were expected to be good for the Rebels in 2026.
He also relayed that he is hesitant, in general, to enforce buyout agreements against former Ole Miss players, but these deals were broken shortly after they were signed by each individual player.
“Those are the kind that, having signed a brand-new rev share contract basically a week or two before wanting to leave, those are the kind that put you in a bind, especially there in the portal cycle,” Carter said. “Those two we’re going to continue to figure out how to collect. We feel like based on the contract we deserve to collect.”
