Forty names, games, teams and minutiae making news in college football (Marty Smith hostage videos from Mississippi sold separately):
The predictable, “not my fault” choruses are being sung amid the latest travesty in the sport. It’s one of the things the so-called leaders are best at—skirting accountability, pointing fingers, forever failing to care about the product as a whole.
Rest assured, in the College Football Playoff-sabotaging saga of Lane Kiffin (1) jilting Mississippi (2) for LSU (3), there is infinite blame to go around. So much self-interest, so much ego, so little regard—as usual—for the actual players involved. The entire, unprecedented episode is a disgraceful, yet inevitable, byproduct of a broken system and the con men who get rich from it.
Start with the Ole Miss administration, which is clearly placing blame for this on Kiffin. Not completely without merit, which we’ll get to momentarily. But if what Kiffin said is true—that he asked to coach the team through the playoffs, with support from the players, and was told to hit the road—then the leaders of the school put their own pride before the best shot at a national championship. And at Mississippi, the last one of those it could claim came before the football program recruited Black players.
Clearly, keeping Kiffin through the playoff would have been a difficult ask of athletic director Keith Carter (4). LSU is an ancient rival within the same conference, and Ole Miss boosters stepped up big-time in recent years to give Kiffin the NIL backing he wanted. To be shunned hurts. But if Kiffin was all-in on a championship chase and willing to accept, as he put it, “guardrails … to protect the program”—presumably in terms of taking players with him to LSU—why not do it? Why not give your 11–1 team, which is likely to host a home playoff game, the best possible chance at something that would be cherished by the fans forever?
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Part of college football’s problem is the hysteria about preparing for next season, even when it undercuts the current season. If keeping Kiffin would have hurt the Rebels in the transfer market or in high-school recruiting for a maximum of eight weeks, O.K. How many fan bases would take a down year or two in exchange for winning a national title, or even making the CFP quarterfinals or semifinals?
Kiffin is the team’s master offensive strategist. He’s not a CEO type who delegates during the week and only wears the headset on Saturday for decorative purposes. It’s hard to believe the Rebels are going to be as good without him as they’ve been all season with him. In choosing to remove Kiffin from the playoff mix at this late juncture, this might even alter how the selection committee views Ole Miss. Could it hurt its seeding and the potential for a home game?
A similar situation is playing out much differently between Florida (5), Tulane (6) and Jon Sumrall (7). He’s leaving the Green Wave to coach the Gators, but not before finishing the job at Tulane. With a home win in the American Conference championship game this week, that will include a playoff berth. Both schools and the coach are prioritizing Tulane’s special season.
Is that easier to do when there is no rivalry involved? Sure. But it’s still an acknowledgement that a shared goal should be chased to its fullest extent without bailing out for the next thing.
(Also, the insta-promotion of defensive coordinator Pete Golding to the full-time head coach smacks of trying to win the breakup as fast as humanly possible. Maybe it works out well, but Golding wasn’t on any 2025 hot lists to be an SEC head coach prior to this weekend.)
Ole Miss tabbed defensive coordinator Pete Golding as head coach on Sunday after Lane Kiffin’s departure. / Petre Thomas-Imagn Images
All that said, Kiffin’s own “Not My Fault” stance is insulting. He clearly shares in the blame and further distinguishes himself among the oiliest characters in college football history.
He’s been a sower of discord everywhere, a talented coach whose tenures always end badly, acrimoniously and awkwardly. The feature stories that populated the internet this fall about how Kiffin has changed because he does yoga and stopped drinking were the kind of puff pieces that access journalism tends to produce, allowing the coach to reinvent himself.
As it turns out, the spots are still on the leopard. Kiffin’s reputation is earned, not invented.
Everyone who has hired Kiffin as a head coach ends up disliking him, with the possible exception of Florida Atlantic. Al Davis and the Raiders hated him, Tennessee fans hated him, USC fans hated him—now it’s Ole Miss’s turn.
Nobody made Kiffin flirt long and hard during the season with Florida and LSU. Nobody forced him to put his family on private jets to tour Gainesville and Baton Rouge, actions that escalated this into a hysteria. Nobody told him he had to take the LSU job at a time when the Ole Miss job might be just as good.
The most confounding thing here is that Kiffin worked hard enough to put the Rebels on the same plane as the Tigers. Then he decided to leave to chase a championship elsewhere when he already had a chance to chase it at Ole Miss. Over time it will probably be easier to do at LSU, but here in the precious present, he’s giving away an opportunity.
Let’s not excuse LSU for its all-world hypocrisy of recent weeks. Gov. Jeff Landry (8) put on a bravura performance as an outraged champion of fiscal sanity in decrying the massive buyout for fired coach Brian Kelly, pinning the blame on athletic director Scott Woodward and helping push him out. Now LSU is throwing an astronomical contract at Kiffin, because the Tigers need to get back to winning.
Further down the “Not My Fault” list: mega-agent Jimmy Sexton (9). He’s a bull in a china shop, routinely strong-arming schools and helping create the Cult of the Coach that plagues college sports. If you’re appalled by the buyouts that lead to tens of millions in wasted money? Sexton negotiated plenty of them. If you’re ticked off at coaches talking to schools during the season and leaving when there are games still to play? He’s the intermediary facilitating many.
Is Sexton just doing his job? Sure. But it’s a hell of a line to walk to routinely disrupt the sport without ever bearing any responsibility for the tumult.
Next on the “Not My Fault” list: the SEC, commissioner Greg Sankey (10) and the entire leadership of college football. The damaging, nonsensical recruiting calendar drives these problems, and everyone in charge continues to shrug at it. Spasms of outrage blow up, then are allowed to die down because nobody really seems to care about football cheapening its postseason.
Nowhere is the eat-or-be-eaten justification for every trespass of ethics, professional courtesy and decorum more prominent than in Sankey’s league. The lack of an NFL-style protocol for when coaches can be interviewed and hired is one thing; the complete Wild West approach in the SEC is another. I asked the commissioner a couple of weeks ago whether he had any misgivings about Ole Miss standing to have its special season undercut by league rivals, and he basically washed his hands of it.
“I think we have as many presidential openings,” Sankey said. “Nobody reports about those and nobody really talks about the timing of those being filled. I can control what I can control. I don’t worry about things like that. That’s not something that I control. I would anticipate the coaches that have dedicated the whole season to a team, recruited young people onto their team, would fulfill that obligation to their team. But we’re going to have to see what happens.”
So it goes. For 10 months a year, everyone in the sport preaches teamwork and togetherness, and for the last two months of the year it’s every coach for himself. Games are reduced to sideshow status. And with the expanded playoff, the carousel has become an existential threat to how college football crowns a champion.
Lane Kiffin is the first to cross the Rubicon by lighting a season and his reputation on fire. But he had co-conspirators in the act. Is this going to become the corrosive norm?
If today were Selection Sunday—and it nearly is—here is how The Dash would arrange the College Football Playoff field.
College Football Playoff Projected Seeding After Week 14
- Ohio State
- Indiana
- Georgia
- Texas Tech
- Oregon
- Mississippi
- Texas A&M
- Oklahoma
- Notre Dame
- Alabama
- Virginia
- Tulane
On the Bubble
First Round
Quarterfinals
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