After burning down an entire state's worth of bridges with his incredibly messy exit from Ole Miss, Lane Kiffin is now the head coach at LSU. The controversy surrounding his departure from Oxford did the impossible, making Kiffin's name even more infamous than it already was, and has put a massive spotlight on his first season in Baton Rouge. Ahead of that first season, Kiffin is out making the image-rehabilitation rounds, kicking things off with a Vanity Fair profile, in which the "still shaken" coach aims to tell his side of the fiasco in which he abandoned his team in the middle of a playoff run for a bigger school and a bigger contract. Kiffin centers his self-justification around the college football calendar, which is fair. As currently organized, the calendar really is absolutely fucked, requiring coaches and students alike to make major decisions about their futures while the season is still ongoing. There was no reasonable scenario in which Kiffin could've delayed taking the LSU job till Ole Miss's playoff run came to an end. But while it is kinda true that the calendar forced his hand, it's also kinda besides the point. You don't get an entire state to curse your name simply because you took a new job. What really riled up Mississippians is how his decision to move on, and especially the timing of it, demonstrated just how little regard he holds this program in. The move was straight out of the well-established Kiffin career playbook: Take over an underperforming program, march them to the cusp of the summit, then flee for greener pastures, all but explicitly stating that he sees the program's potential as maxed out. It makes for a wicked burn on the school in question. It hurt Tennessee when he did it to them back in 2010, and it hurts Ole Miss now. And it also reveals Kiffin's bone-deep belief that he could and should always do better, that coaching is purely transactional, and that the dreams he sells upon first getting the job about being in it for the long haul are just that: dreams. Of course, none of that is in the Vanity Fair profile. Instead Kiffin flips it around and argues that, actually, it was Ole Miss that lacked loyalty to him, or at least would have in some hypothetical future where Kiffin wasn't winning championships every other year or something:
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