Those Ole Miss football fans angry now with Lane Kiffin might want to think back to six years ago when Kiffin was hired to come to Oxford.
Though considered a brilliant offensive mind, Kiffin was a gamble, having either bombed or left for supposedly greener pastures too quickly at the other places he had coached.
He ended up coaching the Rebels about twice as long as his track record would have predicted. He made them relevant in the national championship conversation in a way that they hadn’t been since the days of coaching legend Johnny Vaught more than 60 years ago. Anecdotally, it’s also believed that the success of the football team translated into the continuing enrollment gains at the university.
In return, Ole Miss, besides paying him millions of dollars a year, helped Kiffin rehabilitate his professional reputation and improve his personal life. In an ESPN documentary aired earlier this fall, Kiffin said the move to Oxford helped him to stop drinking, get fit and be a better family man.
It was a good arrangement for both parties while it lasted. It’s a shame it has ended as messily as it has, mostly because Kiffin had unrealistic expectations of how Ole Miss would respond to his desire for a divorce.
Kiffin, who was being heavily recruited for the coaching openings at Florida and LSU, dragged out his decision for weeks. As late as Friday, following the Rebels’ victory over in-state rival Mississippi State, he said that he had not made a decision. Chances are that wasn’t true, that he had already decided to take the LSU offer but was trying to negotiate a way that he could also coach Ole Miss in the upcoming playoffs.
There was no way that Ole Miss was going to agree to that, leaving a lame-duck coach in place to have more opportunity to recruit away coaches and players for one of its biggest rivals.
In a sport that has been marred by rampant greed, Kiffin’s decision to leave was about money and wasn’t. Ole Miss would have matched or come close to the $13 million a year LSU is going to pay him. But what reportedly Ole Miss couldn’t match is the tens of millions of dollars annually that LSU supporters are willing to fork out in order to field the best team money can buy.
That sadly is the name of the game today in bigtime college sports, and Kiffin has become one of the best at adapting to it. He lost 18 starters from last year’s Ole Miss team that just missed out on the college football playoffs, and still he fielded an even better squad this year. That’s largely due to his mastery of the transfer portal, which allows players to jump freely at the end of every season to whichever school will give them more exposure, more money or both.
Loyalty – whether to players, coaches or schools – has evaporated. To expect it is to only set oneself up for disappointment.
Kiffin is doing what he thinks is best for Kiffin. He has calculated that he has a greater chance of winning national championships at LSU than Ole Miss. If that means bailing on the Rebel players and making it harder for them to do well in this year’s playoffs by taking several members of the Rebel staff with him, don’t expect him to lose much sleep about it.
One of Kiffin’s previous bosses, the late Al Davis of the NFL’s Oakland (now Las Vegas) Raiders, was famous for the three-word directive to the team’s coaches and players: “Just win, baby.”
Kiffin didn’t mesh with Davis, but the motto explains Kiffin’s decision as well as anything.
