Paul Finebaum calls out Lane Kiffin for ‘trying to wipe Ole Miss off the face of the Earth’

LSU Tigers head football coach Lane Kiffin is no stranger to controversy, and he had another one on his hands after he touched on the difficulties he had recruiting black players to play for him during his tenure with the Ole Miss Rebels due to the school’s deeply racist past.

“‘Hey, coach, we really like you. But my grandparents aren’t letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi,’” Kiffin told Vanity Fair’s Chris Smith of what he’d hear from recruits. “That doesn’t come up when you say Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Parents were sitting here this weekend saying the campus’s diversity feels so great: ‘It feels like there’s no segregation. And we want that for our kid because that’s the real world.’”

Ultimately, Lane Kiffin apologized for the comments, insisting that he was just simply trying to provide insight into his decision to leave Oxford for Baton Rouge rather than take a “calculated” shot at the institution that had previously employed him.

The damage was already done, however, with his initial comments snowballing into a story of their own, and ESPN college football analyst Paul Finebaum believes that’s exactly as Kiffin intended.

“The most important thing to factor in here, this wasn’t a slip of the tongue,” Finebaum told Mike Greenberg on Get Up. “I talked to the writer who did the Vanity Fair piece the other day, Kurt Smith. He said he didn’t even ask Kiffin about the racism aspect of it. Kiffin just started rifting.

“And this is Kiffin trying to wipe Ole Miss off the face of the earth. He is still very bitter at them, even though they’re the jilted lover. He’s bitter at them, Greeny, because they wouldn’t let him coach in the playoffs, and he has to recruit against them, and he also has to play against them on September 19th, a game that will gain a little bit of attention.”

And Paul Finebaum is probably right that the apology was an empty one. After all, it’s always been the attention that really drives Kiffin. Whether it’s questionable social media content to manufacture engagement or “apologies” that end up prolonging stories, he’s keeping himself in the news cycle. However, Kiffin’s antics come with a $91 million price tag for LSU. Digs at Ole Miss and cute dogs won’t save him if he doesn’t produce wins on Saturdays, just ask Brian Kelly.