ON TODAY'S SCORECARD
He Wanted His Cake and to Eat it, Too
Being an adult means making hard decisions, insists Nicole Auerbach of NBC Sports. It also means living with the fallout from those hard decisions.
Lane Kiffin didn’t want to do either. He didn’t want to be pressured into actually making the decision to leave Ole Miss — in the middle of its best season in program history — for LSU. He then didn’t want to lose the chance to coach his Ole Miss team through the College Football Playoff while working as the head coach at LSU. According to multiple reports, he threatened to take staffers with him to Baton Rouge immediately if the Ole Miss brass wouldn’t let him pull double-duty.
You know what would absolutely guarantee the opportunity to coach this Ole Miss team as it chases a national championship? Staying at Ole Miss.
If you choose to leave, you lose the right to do that. And Kiffin struggled to come to terms with that because he wanted to have his cake and eat it, too. He told reporters after the Egg Bowl on Friday that this decision was genuinely difficult and that he wasn’t enjoying being the center of the sport’s attention.
But the decision was only difficult because Kiffin knew he wanted to go to LSU. Lots of other coaches decided to recommit to their current schools in the middle of the season, some also ahead of potential CFP runs. It didn’t take Curt Cignetti a long time to decide to stay at Indiana or Rhett Lashlee at SMU — and those were coaches at nontraditional powers who could have easily defended decisions to seek blueblood destinations with historical success.
This was never a college football calendar issue for Kiffin, though some pundits liked to make that case to give him cover. Other SEC head coaches of CFP contenders would not consider abandoning them. The longer Kiffin dragged the whole thing out, the more obvious it was that he’d be leaving Ole Miss — and that he thought he could dictate the terms of his departure. And that he could take whichever players and coaches he wanted with him, too.
But of course Kiffin couldn’t coach Ole Miss through the postseason. This isn’t like Jon Sumrall coaching potentially two more games with Tulane before going to Florida — a big jump up that puts him in a new conference and new tax bracket. That’s apples to oranges with an SEC coach making an interconference move. It’s absurd that Kiffin even thought it possible.
He’s the LSU head coach now, and he’ll be acting in the best interest of LSU moving forward. He can take Ole Miss staffers and poach Ole Miss players if he wants, but he’ll be vilified for it. Decisions have repercussions. Actions have consequences.
And this didn’t have to get so messy. It didn’t need to be this ugly. I genuinely think Ole Miss fans would have understood Kiffin leaving for LSU if he did it differently. Not in the middle of the greatest season in program history.
Abandoning them now implies he didn’t really think they could win a national title. He thought he’d taken Ole Miss as far as it could go, and that he couldn’t actually win a championship there.
Now, instead of gearing up for the program’s first CFP appearance and the kind of special season you spend your whole life hoping to be part of, Kiffin is walking out the door. He’s pretending he’s been wronged by the school that gave him another shot in the SEC just because his bosses won’t let him coach one team while running a rival’s.
And it’s shown us that maybe Lane Kiffin hasn’t changed that much after all. |
