What a week, huh? It's, ahem, Tuesday.
On Monday, Vanity Fair published a profile of Lane Kiffin, in which the LSU head coach explained his justification for leaving Ole Miss on the verge of the College Football Playoff. LSU offers him a better chance to sign elite high school players, which everyone knew, and it was a unanimous decision among the people in Kiffin's life to take the LSU job. He's said all that before. However, he trotted out a new line in the piece:
"[They would say], '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' diversity feels so great: 'It feels like there's no segregation. And we want that for our kid because that's the real world.'"
Sensing the verbal grenade he'd just tossed, Kiffin texted the Vanity Fair piece's author with a follow up: "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."
This isn't the time or place to dive into that rabbit hole, but let's just mention LSU's Tigers nickname comes from a Confederate battalion and leave it at that.
So, that was Monday. Tuesday began with Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian describing Ole Miss's academic standards thusly:
“At Texas, we will only take 50% of a player’s academic credit hours,” Sarkisian told USA Today. “You may be a semester from graduating, but you’re going all the way back to 50% if you play here and want a degree. But at Ole Miss, they can take you. All you have to do is take basket weaving, and you can get an Ole Miss degree.”
So, in the eyes of their rivals, Ole Miss is an irredemably racist institution with zero academic standards. Perhaps Kirby Smart will come out Wednesday and say Colonel Reb smells bad from up close.
Kiffin apologized Tuesday for the above comment, but that ball has already left the cannon. One assumes Pete Golding, AD Keith Carter, or both will respond sooner or later, especially with the SEC's spring meetings coming up later this month where they'll both be asked to respond.
The Rebels will get a chance to respond in kind on the field -- LSU comes to Oxford on Sept. 19, and they visit Texas Oct. 24.