There was a time, in the distant past, when boxing was called the red-light district of sports in this country. Now it is college football, and that doesn’t just mean a gold-plated phony like Lane Kiffin and the gold-plated phonies from LSU who just hired him. It means all of them: Coaches and college presidents and athletic directors and the players who move around the way Kiffin does, just for less money. At least they don’t make it sound like a higher calling.
Kiffin – before he commenced praying about taking the money – got offended the other day, inferring that a sportswriter was calling him a “hoe.” That really is a good one, especially at this time of year. Hoe, hoe, hoe to all of them.
Even more than college basketball, where you can throw money around and change your entire roster from year to year, college football really does make the other pro sports look like church in comparison.
I love the idea that Kiffin, before making a move to LSU he was always going to make even if he had to leave at halftime of Ole Miss’s first-round game in the College Football Playoffs, leaned on the counsel of Nick Saban and Pete Carroll. Beautiful. Saban left the Dolphins two years into a five-year contract to head for Alabama. Carroll, a great college coach himself at USC, left that school one step ahead of the NCAA law. Oh, sure. Google it.
I also love the idea that this is all the NCAA’s fault because of an idiotic calendar, especially for signing players, that now appears to be older than the earth, and needs to be changed. It doesn’t make Kiffin some kind of victim here, the way he wasn’t a victim when he left Tennessee and left USC and left Alabama when he was Saban’s assistant when he was taking the Florida Atlantic job. His next stop after that was Ole Miss.
But this is his world, greedy and dumb and desperate at the same time, all at its highest levels, as if run by oligarchs of college sports. Right after LSU has to write a check of more than $50 million to Brian Kelly, the last savior in Baton Rouge before Kiffin, they give Lane Kiffin a contract for nearly twice that much. It happens not too terribly long after Texas A&M had to pay out $77 million to Jimbo Fisher when he was asked to leave College Station, Tex.
Kiffin has a perfect right to take what he considers a better job, even if it sure didn’t look that way in either Oxford, Miss. or Baton Rouge this past season. He broke no laws, even running out on a team with a shot at the national championship this close to the playoffs. He might very well win a title for LSU, the way Saban did before him, and Les Miles, and even Ed Orgeron. Incidentally? When Orgeron was let go four years ago, the school only owed him $17 million. Apparently that’s just like loose change in Baton Rouge these days.
Kiffin has never sniffed a title in college football until this season. Now it’s as if he invented college football over the past four months. And if he does finally win it all with the LSU Tigers, guess what? It might take some of the stink off leaving a team this way in December, with the playoffs about to begin in a few weeks. But some of the stink will always be on him. Kiffin is only 50. He might only be halfway into his head coaching career. What he did and the way he did it – whether he was taking a better job offer or not – stays with him everywhere except Baton Rouge, a festival of dumb greed, where they are now on the hook for around $150 million for their past two football coaches.
“Only Lane Kiffin would burn a bridge while trying to stand on it,” one agent told Brett McMurphy of On3Sports over the weekend.
Here is what Kiffin himself said:
“I always hated how we gave it one year at Tennessee and left. I hated that feeling of that. I think we gave a lot to this program and to this city and some of those historic wins in this stadium, best regular season in the history of the school. So, I’m proud of that part. But it just became time. I talked to God, and he told me it’s time to take a new step. It’s a new chapter.”
We have no way of getting God’s version of that particular conversation, of course.
So Kiffin is now the poster boy for all of it, and college sports in general and college football in particular looking like the capital of grift these days. And before you wring your hands over the Ole Miss players being left high and dry this way by their former coach, just wait to see how many of them with eligibility are still in Oxford next season.
When Kiffin was praying about this and that, was there something in the divine back-and-forth about telling the assistant coaches he was taking with him that if they weren’t on the private plane taking him from Oxford to Baton Rouge, there wouldn’t be a job waiting for them there. Still Kiffin gets defended all over the place by ex-coaches, both in and out of the media. At least most of them are honest enough to say they would have made the same move if someone ever gave them the chance.
Kiffin has done everything except hire skywriters over the past month to let everybody know of his interest in the Florida and LSU jobs. But now he wants to be a victim because he can’t coach his team in the tournament. Now wants this to be the fault of his athletic director at Ole Miss. Sure it is. The beauty of this, truly, is that LSU thinks he won’t do it to them someday. They deserve each other.
