Court Jesters into Kings: The Lane Kiffin coaching circus

There are times when a story in sports makes you feel like you need a shower. Like you’ve opened up the sports page in the paper and fallen into the black hole of the Kardashians or Whispering Wives from Mormon Tribes. Except it’s not those things at all; it’s technically a football story, and a coach is at the center.

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The time football fans have spent keeping up with the Lane Kiffin coaching circus should make everyone reevaluate their life.

If I’ve spent a minute reading an article on it, a wave of brainspace listening to a podcast prognosticating on his destination, or an iota of my time listening to talking heads defend him, those are precious seconds on this Earth which I will never get back. Because Kiffin is a court jester, college football’s chief internet troll, yet the entire college football ecosystem has spent the last three months attempting to make him over into coaching royalty.

And we’re all worse off for it.

Kiffin, now at LSU, leaves Ole Miss for Baton Rouge with a knife planted in Oxford, Mississippi’s back while the Rebels are firmly in the College Football Playoff. As Dan Wetzel of ESPN wrote, Kiffin is leaving an actual playoff team for a theoretical one. He then had the gall to ask the Ole Miss AD if he could stick around and coach the team through the CFP — the equivalent of setting your own house on fire and then asking your spouse if you can have the salvaged furniture.

As silly as that all might be, the leaving part is what it is; coaches are some combination of mercenaries and nomads. They seek out greener pastures just as players now do, but just as people do every single day looking for jobs on LinkedIn. We just aren’t tracking private planes for when you move from a role at Dell to one at Lenovo.

But I will say, I’m less impressed by Kiffin’s resumé at Ole Miss than most. I don’t think a statue should be built for someone winning ten games in the SEC during the era of the transfer portal and NIL. No SEC team should have to wander in the perpetual darkness like the Vanderbilts and Kentuckys of yesteryear when you have the entire G5 to legally poach players from.

What all of this reveals is how desperate the college football world is for someone to take up the mantle that’s been left by Nick Saban, even Jim Harbaugh and Urban Meyer, to a lesser degree. Because Dabo Swinney is sinking with his antiquated ship. And Deion Sanders was a false prophet. As for the current titans of the sport, the great Kirby Smart and most recent champion Ryan Day simply haven’t been nomadic enough to generate the type of buzz that their forefathers were. There’s a coaching vacuum that the college football media space is desperate to fill. One that Mike Elko is too large for, Steve Sarkisian is too down to earth and Lincoln Riley is too cooked like his Easter brisket. ESPN is one of, if not the most, guilty parties for perpetuating this mess. The Kirk Herbstreits and Todd McShays of the world were and are foaming at the mouth desperate for someone to anoint.

As Alfred tells Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight, “You squeezed them. You hammered them to the point of desperation. And in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn’t fully understand.” We’ve turned to someone who has never competed for a championship and has been associated with some of the sport’s most infamous exits fans have ever seen.

Yet we continue to attempt to place a crown upon the clown prince’s head. The same coach who was deemed too unprofessional by Al freaking Davis, who was almost tarred and feathered in Knoxville, who was fired on an airport tarmac at his dream job, and who was axed by Saban before a national championship. Now, do we expect things to be different in Baton Rouge?

The PR machine floods us with stories about hot yoga and sobriety while expecting us to ignore the fact Kiffin had a fake political prop dog to foster goodwill in Oxford. Kiffin’s schtick was spun as if it was endearing at Ole Miss and I’ll admit, I even found the digs at Jimbo Fisher and Brian Kelly amusing at times. But when you tap your feet and clap to a monkey, it will only dance harder. It won’t stop being a monkey. Eventually, it’s going to throw its own poop at your face.

I’m reminded of the famous Waylon Jennings song High Time (You Quit Your Lowdown Ways).

Everywhere you’ve been
You’ve been the belle of the ball
It’s high time you quit your lowdown ways

As long as the media continues to elevate Kiffin despite him never being a championship coach, this is what we’ll get: the circus we’ve asked for. LSU faithful will tell themselves their prestige, talent bed, and fanaticism are the match made in Heaven for their new coach. But the reality is they’ll be left in a pile of smoldering ash at some point, just like Kiffin’s other stops.

Then I guess we’ll get to do all these shenanigans again. 

We’ll continue to try and turn a court jester into a king.

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This post originally aired on Dance With Who Brung Ya.