Carpetbagger Kiffin Has To Go

One of the more amusing things about the Lane Kiffin exit drama has been watching the propaganda unfold.

To catch up, things started to become clearer on Monday of this week, despite Kiffin’s attempts at obfuscation and damage control. On Sunday, his ex-wife and his son, who quarterbacks the Oxford High School football team (which is in the middle of its own playoff run) flew by private jet to Gainsville, where they toured several area high schools, and then on Monday, Kiffin’s ex-wife and entourage did the same thing in Baton Rouge. Later in the day, the press reported that Kiffin had been given the deadline to declare his intentions for the Egg Bowl, the day after Thanksgiving, which social media geniuses called an “ultimatum.”

Yesterday, I watched a 20 minute stream of total bullshit on the Pat McAfee show, agent-scripted propaganda in which we were told, no, none of this drama is a distraction at all, that Kiffin is completely focused on Ole Miss and winning the next game, and in fact there never was an “ultimatum” of any sort, so calm down Ole Miss fan base. Everything is just fine. Simultaneously, McAfee emphasized that Ole Miss is, in fact, a second/third tier football program that owes everything to it’s celebrity football coach. Ole Miss was just lucky it got to bask in his greatness for six years. Kiffin sat there with a shit-eating grin and he bubbled over about how everything was going great in Oxford, how the team was in fact hyper-focused on Mississippi State, quite out of character for him with his usual deadpan delivery and backhanded jabs at the Ole Miss history and facilities. All the talk he did in press conferences was about how Ole Miss can’t fill it’s stadium (when it plays the Citadel), about the size of the stadium, about how Ole Miss isn’t a “blue blood” program.

Lane Kiffin thinks he is somehow better than Ole Miss. He is arrogant. He has to go.

Understand, Lane Kiffin has already decided he is going. The only thing staying his hand from going ahead with it is reputational damage. You see, he is still dealing with his reputation as a carpetbagger from his ridiculous exit from Tennessee. It would look terrible if he exited before the playoff game, which would be cast as his abandoning this 10-1 playoff-bound team. He has to do it in a way that doesn’t make him look like a scumbag. In other words, Kiffin doesn’t give one single damn about Ole Miss football, these players, or even winning a playoff game. He cares about how it looks. That is Lane Kiffin.

Problem is, now us Ole Miss fans, boosters, and administrators cannot have any confidence that Kiffin will give it his all in coaching those games. He’s in an impossible bind now. If he loses to Mississippi State, we will think it was because Kiffin was already checked out, and that his players were distracted, and rightfully so. If it shows poorly in the playoff game, same thing. We are past the point of no return now.

Kiffin has to go, and Ole Miss must create the pretext to fire him, and that is what I suspect the deadline is all about. I don’t want him anywhere near the playoff game. No where near it. I want him at Florida, or at LSU, enjoying his success as finally finding himself coaching at a “blue blood” pressure cooker. I want to see him coaching a program that is commensurate with his elevated view of himself.