The Auburn Tigers are looking like they are going to have to hit the reset button as a program — another one of their players is reportedly entering the transfer portal.
With the start of head coach Alex Golesh, the Tigers have seen numerous players declare their intentions to enter the transfer portal over the last few weeks.
None of them have been anywhere near as significant as the news that broke on Monday. Star wide receiver Cam Coleman seems to be the latest player entering the portal, according to a report from On3’s Hayes Fawcett.
Coleman — who has racked up over 1,300 yards and 13 touchdowns over the last two seasons — will instantly become the top available player in the portal and will be sought after by every team in the country looking to add a wide receiver.
The star wideout joins fellow soon-to-be former Tigers in the portal, including Malcolm Simmons, Horatio Fields, Jay Crawford, Robert Woodyard, Kayin Lee, Ashton Daniels and numerous others. It looks like what could be a painful rebuild for Auburn really begins now.
Of course, Golesh will supplement from the portal himself. There’s a case to be made for not getting too broken up about gutting a roster that just went 5-7, but Tiger fans are rightfully upset to lose Coleman.
Coleman’s moves in the transfer portal could end up breaking NIL records, and have now made him the most-followed recruit of the offseason.
Michael Brauner is a Senior Sports Analyst and Contributing Writer for Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on Twitter @MBraunerWNSP and hear him every weekday morning from 6 to 9 a.m. on “The Opening Kickoff” on WNSP-FM 105.5, available free online.
OK, so maybe it wasn’t the tarmac, maybe that’s just Trojan lore, maybe the abrupt firing took place in a small room next to the runway.
Either way, the memory has been burned in Kiffin’s heart and mind, helping motivate him to increased success on the field and seemingly heartfelt balance in his personal life.
Now the tables have turned. Kiffin, 50, has led Ole Miss to a No. 5 national ranking and 10-1 record, the fourth year in the last five the Rebels have won at least 10 games. He seemingly shed the reputation for aloofness and me-first attitude that dogged him as a failed NFL head coach at age 32 and as an Alabama assistant let go by Nick Saban days before a national title game for focusing too much on his next job.
Yet, here we are again, Kiffin apparently contemplating the unthinkable. Would he really abandon Ole Miss on the eve of the College Football Playoff for Florida or Louisiana State, fellow SEC schools and established national powers hunting for head coaches?
A young fan shows his support for Mississippi coach Lane Kiffin during the second half of a game against Florida in Oxford, Miss., on Nov. 15, 2025.
(Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press)
Kiffin’s ex-wife Layla — they are on friendly terms — and 17-year-old son Knox recently were flown on private jets to Gainesville, Fla., and Baton Rouge, La., presumably to check out the livability and vibes of the potential next entry on Kiffin’s resume.
Ole Miss is well aware of Kiffin’s impending decision and clearly want to know the answer ahead of the Rebels’ regular-season finale Nov. 28 against Mississippi State. Kiffin, however, denied rumors that Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter had given him an ultimatum to decide before then.
“Yeah, that’s absolutely not true,” Kiffin told “The Pat McAfee Show” on ESPN on Tuesday. “There has been no ultimatum, anything like that at all. And so I don’t know where that came from, like a lot of stuff that comes out there. Like I said, man, we’re having a blast. I love it here.”
In fairness to Kiffin, the urgency to decide now rather than at season’s end is a function of today’s college football recruiting calendar and transfer portal. The high school signing period begins Dec. 3 and the transfer portal opens Jan. 2.
The first round of the CFP will be Dec. 19 and 20. The quarterfinals are on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. Florida and LSU can’t wait that long to hire a coach.
What should he do? Most seasoned pundits believe he should not budge.
“Kiffin should stay and see the season out; attempt to win, try to reach the Final Four or beyond, make the memories, and forge the deep bonds that coaching is supposed to be about,” longtime columnist Dan Wetzel wrote for ESPN.
Reasons to jump to LSU or Florida are that both schools are in talent-rich states with massive fan bases and deep tradition. The ceiling is higher and the stands fuller than in Oxford, Miss. Also, coaches at those established SEC powers tend to dig in for years. Who knows when a similar opportunity will present itself?
Kiffin’s quandary is understandable. Old Miss administrators, however, vividly recall 2022 when Kiffin was courted by Auburn and allowed the issue to linger and sabotage a potentially great season. The Rebels were 8-1 when the rumors began and then lost four in a row.
Nobody at Ole Miss wants another collapse because Kiffin — again — had a wandering eye. His decision is difficult, and won’t wait.
People who lost homes in the Palisades and Eaton fires can now go online to pick vetted residential templates that could save them money and be ready as early as next year.
Builders Alliance, a nonprofit organization formed in response to the fires, on Friday launched a portal that offers survivors a selection of homes, filtered by lot size, price range and other preferences.
“We’re trying to create an ‘easy’ button for homeowners,” said Lew Horne, the chairman of Project Recovery, a group of academics and real estate industry experts who had created a road map for recovery.
Construction crews work on rebuilding a home and properties after the federal cleanup in Altadena on Sept. 10.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Project Recovery’s March report — which was compiled by professors in the real estate graduate schools at USC and UCLA, along with the Los Angeles chapter of the Urban Land Institute, a real estate nonprofit education and research institute — said an alliance of builders could work together for economies of scale to speed up reconstruction and make it more affordable and predictable.
The web portal is the latest stop on the report’s road map. It makes it easy for those who lost their homes to pick templates and receive competing bids from builders who have been vetted by Project Recovery.
“We’re keeping a close eye” on the builders, Horne said. “Buyers are going to have a quality home at a quality price in a time frame they can count on.”
Horne is head of the Los Angeles chapter of the Urban Land Institute and president of real estate brokerage CBRE for Southern California. Other leaders of Project Recovery include Stuart Gabriel, director of the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate, and Richard Green, director of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate.
Homeowners using the portal can match their address to home choices that include pre-designed turnkey residences at costs equal to or below average insurance proceeds, Horne said. Owners can also choose more custom builds.
The new Builders Alliance consists of 10 licensed homebuilders, ranging in size from small boutique firms to larger companies such as Richmond American Homes and Brookfield Residential.
Brookfield built more than 200 homes in the La Vina gated community in Altadena, 52 of which burned down, Chief Executive Adrian Foley said.
“Obviously, we were devastated by all of the loss that’s taken place here,” he said. “We wanted to lean in and do anything we could to help out.”
Foley said the consortium was devised to get large and small builders working together to “procure the right material costs and procure plans and specifications that would be appealing to the end user so we could collaborate to beat down costs, be more efficient, and hopefully drive a higher percentage of rebuilding.”
The consortium expects to complete some homes by the third quarter of 2026.
The foundation of the Builders Alliance portal is a digital representation that maps every residential parcel in the Palisades and Eaton fire areas. It uses AI technology and is powered by Canibuild, which provides site-planning software for the residential construction industry.
The portal’s map is trained on local zoning regulations and pairs each lot with extensive menus of designs and costs. Property owners enter their address and can filter options by preferences such as square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms and price.
Officially, Valve—the company behind Steam, Half-Life, and more—has yet to announce its next big game. However, thousands of people are currently playing and posting about Deadlock, Valve’s next big game, literally right now. So uh, what’s going on?
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Thanks to leakers and dataminers, we’ve known about a Valve-developed multiplayer game for a few years now. Before it was Deadlock, it was likely codenamed Neon Prime. At one point since it reportedly started development in 2018, the MOBA/character shooter hybrid was possibly going to be set in the Half-Life/Portal universe, but that has seemingly changed based on gameplay leaks that occurred in May. Now, it seems a rumored playtest for Deadlock is currently underway, with the game developing a community of players on Reddit.
As spotted by IGN, over on SteamDB—a third-party website that tracks various stats about Steam games and players—Deadlock’s player count has been steadily increasing over the last few months. In the last few days, the game cracked 18,000 concurrent players. That means it’s one of the top 65 most played games on Steam, and Valve has yet to even tweet about it or release a trailer.
IGN reports that Deadlock’s current early access period is using an invite system, letting players on Steam grant access to other players. It’s understood that Valve is allowing players with early access to talk about the game online with other players, but videos and screenshots still seem to be under a strict NDA. Many are posting about the game and how much they like it on the Deadlockthegame subreddit.
That means we are in a really weird and somewhat unprecedented situation. A new Valve video game is gaining thousands of players on Steam, it’s got an active subreddit, and we’ve even seen videos of the game in action. Deadlock is real. It’s a thing. It’s Valve’s next game. Yet, officially, Valve has yet to announce it or even tease it.
Many players assume that a full-on reveal for Deadlock and an open-access beta are coming sooner rather than later, with many suggesting September. But for now, we have to wait and see when Valve will decide to announce a game that thousands of people are playing and which already has guides and tier rankings. Strange times. Meanwhile, Valve might be working on Half-Life 3based on some recent leaks. Strange times indeed, folks.
Leah Feiger: I can’t wait to hear about all of that. But let’s start with Elon Musk. If I was to trace back the end of Twitter, it would obviously start with him. David, why did Musk buy Twitter? Take us back to that time.
David Gilbert: I have a feeling he was thinking about buying Twitter for a while. He had been one of the main characters on Twitter for years and had always been very vocal in his opinions and the kind of content that he posted there. But from 2020 onwards, once Donald Trump got kicked off the platform and there was a major shutdown on content in relation to Covid-19 and the vaccines, he became increasingly outraged at what he saw as this over-censorious thing where he felt that people of a certain viewpoint were being silenced on the platform. Of course, that was something that not only Musk had, but a lot of Conservatives felt as well, that they were being silenced. It was bubbling along for a while, the idea that he was going to buy it. He was being urged on by a lot of his supporters, and he has a lot of supporters, to say that he should buy it, he should take it over and turn it into their utopian social media platform. In early 2022, he did. He decided to table a bid of $44 billion. Very quickly, he decided then to turn around and say, “No, actually I don’t want to do that.”
[Archival audio clip]: Then you changed your mind again and decided to buy it. Did you do that-
Elon Musk [Archival audio clip]: Well, I kind of had to.
[Archival audio clip]: Right. Did you do that because you thought that a court would make you do that?
Elon Musk [Archival audio clip]: Yes.
[Archival audio clip]: Right.
Elon Musk [Archival audio clip]: Yes, that is the reason.
Leah Feiger: I always forget that. I always forget that and I love it so much.
David Gilbert: He doesn’t really remind people of it too much. It finally went through and Musk took over, and very quickly made changes. I’m not sure, at that point, Makena, do you think that he really had a vision in mind for what his version of Twitter was going to look like?
Makena Kelly: No, I don’t think it was a vision more than it was a vengeance.
David Gilbert: Yeah.
Makena Kelly: If you look at that time, it’s around the same time that regulators, even just the news, there’s more skepticism about what it is that Elon Musk is doing. He’s not this messiah character who’s going to carry us into some beautiful progressive world where we all drive autonomous vehicles and have solar panels on our houses. People were starting to be a lot more critical of him. Twitter is a space where you have news makers, taste makers, very important people on this platform who are using it every day and that’s where you can really drive a lot of conversation. I feel like Elon Musk, even if it wasn’t front-of-mind, I think he at least knew subconsciously that having some kind of power over this platform would be helpful to him and his brand.
GPU manufacturer Nvidia announced its plans to remaster, with full ray-tracing, Valve’s 2004 first-person shooter Half-Life 2 on August 22. Development will be handled by myriad Half-Life2 mod teams, including those that made Half-Life 2: VR, united under new studio Orbifold, and it’ll be released for free.
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Half-Life 2 RTX, which “is early in development,” a blog Nvidia posted to its site says, does not yet have a release date, but it relies on the tech company’s also unreleased, free modding platform RTX Remix. Through its “latest version,” Nvidia says, Orbifold is “rebuilding materials with Physically Based Rendering (PBR) properties, adding extra geometric detail via Valve’s Hammer editor, and leveraging NVIDIA technologies including full ray-tracing, DLSS 3, Reflex, and RTX IO to deliver a fantastic experience for GeForce RTX gamers.”
A trailer showcasing stunning improvements to environments indicates as much. But before any diehard fans get giddy about their favorite game’s makeover, it seems likely that, when Half-Life 2 RTX releases, it’ll be hard to find a PC that can handle it.
Nvidia’s free-to-play modding project from earlier this summer, Portal: Prelude RTX, currently has a “mostly negative” review rating on Steam because of frequent crashes (and bad puzzles).
“I figured I would give this a shot,” says a top-voted review. “I have a 13900K, a 4090 [GPU], 64 gigs of RAM, and the most recent drivers and patches. Nope, the game lasted about 10 seconds before it froze with stuttering audio.”
But, you know, we’re talking about free mods. There are few meaningful setbacks to trying out Half-Life 2 RTX once it’s out, especially as its source material, as Riley MacLeod says with Delphic pronunciation in a 2016 Kotaku review, is “a place more than a game.”
“It creates a player who is in control,” he writes, “who can effortlessly navigate the game world to do what they want to do, who feels confident and empowered and all the words games trip over themselves to promise us now.”
My life changed forever when I got a copy of Final Fantasy VII in 1997 (losing those discs has haunted me ever since). While I enjoy much of the 2020 Remake, the original experience is irreplaceably special to me. I start a new playthrough of it at least once a year, every year. Other times, I’ll just jump into a random save file I was working my way through at some point. It must be on anything I own that can run it.
Since 2015, the remaster (not Remake) has made the experience much smoother; and it’s always fun to occasionally mess around with mods that tweak character models or apply AI upscaled backgrounds to clean up the image.
The story, the characters, the landmark soundtrack with gorgeous compositions and tear-jerking melodies surpass the limitations of the rather humdrum sounds the midi-controlled sequencer on the PSX produced, it culminates into not just one of my favorite video games of all time, it’s one of my favorite media experiences, period.
Final Fantasy VII, in its original form, is an epic story of identity, friendship, love, and struggle in the face of insurmountable odds against seemingly unstoppable foes. I delight, as I did in my youth, blissfully getting lost in it. Its world, with blocky polygonal models might seem primordial by today’s standards, but to me its graphical limitations are an abstract that paints a bigger picture in my head—one that no amount of modern, hyper powerful game engines with all the bells and whistles will ever be able to touch.
And, yeah, you were right, Aeris; it was always the only way.
