When considering one’s thoughts about the former Ole Miss coach adding magazine writer to his expert coaching and Instagram/Snapchat direct message skillsets, you have to remember that Pete Golding, who has been a head coach for three games, has two more career playoff wins than he does.
Unless you’ve been logged off or removed from any grid, you’ve likely read quotes from The Lane Kiffin Story Hour in Vanity Fair. Whether you read the whole thing is up to you, but it can be summarized with the words
of Simpsons’ legend Ralph Wiggum:
Mrs. Krabappel and Principal Skinner were in the closet making babies, and I saw one of the babies, and the baby looked at me!
I won’t go through the profile line by line because we have better things to do, but let’s look at a few details Kiffin wrote and Vanity Fair writer Chris Smith copied and pasted into the final draft.
Here is Lane Kiffin when he “looked like a fugitive” after crawling to freedom through five hundred yards of shit smelling foulness I can’t even imagine, or maybe I just don’t want to. Five hundred yards…that’s the length of five football fields, just shy of half a mile.
No word if he, under the name Randall Stephens, also visited nearly a dozen banks in the Oxford area that morning to withdraw the warden’s money before he headed to Baton Rouge.
Here is Lane Kiffin being “followed down a country highway by an angry mob, which screamed cusses…”:
ANGRY MOB. CHASING. RUN OFF THE ROAD. CUSSES. RICH AND COMPELLING.
Sounds great except for one small detail no one at Vanity Fair bothered to check because they ain’t here to play fact-check. They cried, “Give us the deets, daddy Lane!”
According to the Mississippi Highway Patrol, who escorted Kiffin on the UNPAVED COUNTRY HIGHWAY IN BUMPKINVILLE, MISSISSIPPI, the angry mob chase never happened. He made it up because, and this may be shocking to some, he’s a self-serving asshole who always claims to be the victim and never the root of his own problems.
For the record, those stories are in the first two paragraphs of Lane Kiffin’s Lane Kiffin profile. And the real tell Chris Smith copied and pasted what Kiffin wrote is a phrase in the last sentence of the second paragraph:
“…fleeing to a regional airport for a private flight out of dodge…”
Look, Kiffin is a great football coach, but he’s not a master of language. The idiom is “get out of Dodge,” which is a reference to Dodge City, Kansas and its insanity in the 1870s. And again, an editor or fact-checker could’ve corrected that, but that’s not part of the show.
After the first two paragraphs, the profile slogs through Kiffin’s story and the general state of college football. It’s probably new information to those who don’t follow the sport yet are reading a Lane Kiffin profile (?), but it’s not anything new to Ole Miss or college football fans.
Near the end though, Kiffin writes about Ole Miss’ “struggle to to distance itself from symbols like the Confederate flag, Colonel Rebel, and the nickname ‘Ole Miss’ itself,” and how that affected recruiting. In fact, here is Lane Kiffin, according to Lane Kiffin, fighting the racists and segregationists in Oxford (language warning):
A simple fact-check could’ve noted that the Confederate flag has effectively been banned from Ole Miss games for 30 years (still not ideal!), Colonel Reb got the boot in 23 years ago, and Kiffin never said a word about any of this as head coach in Oxford. Ole Miss doesn’t “struggle” with any of it, but they deal with it in recruiting because other schools (like Kiffin at LSU) lie about it to recruits.
To be fair, Ole Miss opened the door to negative recruiting due to continued public racist horseshit when all the other racist schools and fans (not just in the South!) decided to stop doing very loud racism.
It’s important to note Kiffin’s aforementioned silence in Oxford because Tommy Tuberville, former Ole Miss coach and current racist shithead, brought up the Confederate flag and related imagery repeatedly when he was in Oxford. He used his power and influence to get rid of the flag because he knew it was a problem in recruiting.
That’s a long way of once again saying Kiffin is a self-serving asshole who will do or say anything to hurt the school that wouldn’t let him coach the playoff and he now competes against.
Obviously, this latest (and not final!) round of Mad Adult Diaper-Filling Baby™ adds fuel to the scene on September 19th when LSU plays at Ole Miss. My hope is Ole Miss fans refrain from giving Kiffin his oxygen, which is letting him claim to be a victim, and instead we lean into the PETTINESS.
For example, let’s consider the pre-game “Are You Ready/Hotty Toddy” celebrity on the jumbotron. Perhaps a former young lady friend of Kiffin’s appears on the screen minutes before kickoff and says:
“Hey there, Ole Miss fans. Do I spy an old dusty bitch down there on the visiting sideline? Unlike the court order that wouldn’t let him in my house, SEC rules allow him to be in our house for this game. So I’ve got one question for you…”
Way more fun than doing some Tennessee bullshit and throwing things at him.
