Lane Kiffin Argues Controversial Ole Miss Comments in 'Vanity Fair' Weren’t His Opinions

Lane Kiffin’s mouth may have gotten him in trouble with the SEC. | Matthew Hinton-Imagn Images

The SEC spring meetings will take place this week in Florida, and Lane Kiffin will be one of the many hot topics discussed in both one-on-one and group settings. After coaching Ole Miss into the college football playoff last season, he left for a job at LSU and took some coaches and recruits with him when he left.

The latest controversy involving the coach and his former employer came from somewhere you generally don't find college football coaches—the pages of Vanity Fair. Specifically, Kiffin told the magazine that Ole Miss's history was a drawback when it came to recruiting. Via Vanity Fair:

When he was coaching there, Kiffin says, top recruits would tell him, “‘Hey, coach, we really like you. But my grandparents aren’t letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi.’ That doesn’t come up when you say Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Parents were sitting here this weekend saying the campus’s diversity feels so great: ‘It feels like there’s no segregation. And we want that for our kid because that’s the real world.’” (The next day Kiffin added, “I just hope [my comment] comes across respectful to Ole Miss…. There are some things that I’m saying that are factual, they’re not shots.”The population of Baton Rouge is about 51% Black and 36% white; Oxford is about 66% white, 26% Black. )

Kiffin was unsurprisingly quiet on that subject when he was at Ole Miss, and mentioning it after he left sounded opportunistic (even if he emphasized the fact that he was trying to "come across respectful" and that the comments were "not shots.") Whatever his intentions were, it's not the type of thing that a coach generally says out loud.

Now, according to USA Today's Matt Hayes, the conference is considering reprimanding Kiffin for his comments in Vanity Fair and will be discussing it at the SEC spring meetings. With that in mind, Kiffin told USA Today that those weren't even his words.

“People don’t read the actual words I used in the article,” Kiffin told USA TODAY Sports. “I said, ‘A parent said.’ That’s not me saying it as my opinion.”

Kiffin is technically right. In the Vanity Fair piece, he couched the negative comments about Ole Miss as something recruits would tell him, and the positive things about LSU as things parents had been saying. And there's no way to prove that anonymous people didn't say those things to Kiffin. So reprimanding him could be tricky, but the conference will still look into it this week when they aren't weighing the pros and cons of saving college football as we know it.

The bigger problem for the SEC is that Kiffin is not the only coach saying more than the conference would like. Even if they can't do anything publicly, maybe they can get everyone together and tell them to chill out.

Whether or not Kiffin is reprimanded, he will have to answer for his transgressions on the field early in the season, when LSU travels to Ole Miss on Sept. 19. Expectations are incredibly high, as people like former LSU coach Brian Kelly think Kiffin can win a title in Baton Rouge. An early-season setback in Oxford would inspire a whole new set of headlines.

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