The seemingly never-ending soap opera that is Lane Kiffin’s existence on Earth continued this week with excerpts from a forthcoming book on the LSU football coach.
One such passage details, among other things, that he encouraged Clemson coach Dabo Swinney to come forward with accusations that Kiffin’s former employer, Mississippi, had tampered with a player. According to one of the key characters in that drama, though, it didn’t exactly go down like that.
With his Clemson team set to face off against Kiffin’s LSU squad this weekend, Swinney denied that Kiffin played any role in the tampering charges he brought against Ole Miss earlier this year after losing linebacker Luke Ferrelli to the Rebels.
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“Lane Kiffin had nothing to do with, I mean zero to do with me turning in the tampering situation here. Zero,” Swinney said in a news conference on Wednesday, Sept. 2.
In a soon-to-be-released book about Kiffin, “Lane Being Lane: The Story of Lane Kiffin, College Football's Agent of Chaos,” journalist John Talty reported that Kiffin “came off like a man who badly wanted revenge” on Ole Miss after leaving the Rebels to become the new head coach at LSU.
He reportedly acted on that impulse, reaching out to Swinney after Ferrelli — a Cal transfer and the reigning ACC defensive rookie of the year — left Clemson shortly after signing with the Tigers and arriving on campus to head to Ole Miss. The Rebels had reportedly offered him a much more lucrative financial deal than what he was set to receive at Clemson.
Talty reported that Kiffin “egged Swinney to go public against the Rebels,” which the Clemson coach wasted little time doing.
"It's total hypocrisy, because all this is going on while they on the other side are trying to fight their defensive end from going in the portal,” Swinney said during a January news conference in which he recited the dates and times of communication when detailing what happened with Ferrelli’s departure. “They have accused publicly others of tampering with their roster and their players, while they are over here tampering.
"This is just a really sad state of affairs and it's, to me, we have a broken system. If there are no consequences for tampering, then we have no rules and we have no governance. This is not about a linebacker at Clemson. I feel sorry for the young man, to be honest with you. I blame the adults. If you want to have adult world, there needs to be adult consequences."
According to the book, Kiffin passed along information to Swinney to help in his fight against Ole Miss and Kiffin’s successor, Pete Golding. While this was reportedly happening, Clemson offensive line coach Matt Luke, a former Ole Miss player who was Kiffin’s predecessor as the head coach of the Rebels, reached out to his alma mater to let them know what Kiffin was up to.
The NCAA is currently investigating the tampering allegations.
“If you tamper with my program, I'm going to turn you in, and it's just that simple,” Swinney said on Wednesday. “Lane Kiffin had nothing to do with that. Zero. I was turning that in the moment he (Ferrelli) left. Again, nothing against the kid, just the system and the process of what happened. I laid that out very clear, and what happened, and so now it goes to the NCAA.
"Did I have people call me with a lot of hearsay and whatever? Yeah, a bunch of people. I ain't into none of that. I don't care about any of that. I didn't share nothing with anybody other than this is what happened at my school, and gave the exact timeline, and that's it. So Lane Kiffin didn't have anything to do with that, so people can make up whatever stories they want.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Dabo Swinney denies Lane Kiffin 'egged him' to turn in Ole Miss for tampering
