SEC, Ole Miss discuss ‘potential reprimand’ of Lane Kiffin after Vanity Fair interview

The SEC could write another chapter to the Lane Kiffin-Ole Miss saga as the conference prepares for its upcoming spring meetings this week.

According to a report by Matt Hayes in USA Today, the SEC and Ole Miss have discussed “a potential reprimand for new LSU coach Lane Kiffin over comments he made in a recent Vanity Fair magazine interview.” Earlier this month, Vanity Fair published a profile of Kiffin in which he made comments suggesting racial sentiments towards Ole Miss made it difficult to recruit some Black athletes to the school, a problem he alleged does not exist at LSU.

Here is the excerpt from Chris Smith’s Vanity Fair piece:

Kiffin also seems willing to indirectly invoke Ole Miss’s struggle to distance itself from symbols like the Confederate flag, Colonel Rebel, and the nickname “Ole Miss” itself. When he was coaching there, Kiffin says, top recruits would tell him, “‘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’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.’”

Kiffin apologized for the comments shortly after the story published.

“I really apologize if anybody at Ole Miss or in Mississippi was offended by that,” he said. “In a four-hour interview, I was asked a lot of questions on a lot of things, and Ole Miss has been wonderful to me and to my family. That’s a narrative that coaches have been fighting forever. It wasn’t calculated by bringing it up.”

However, Kiffin’s apology was hardly the end of this story, which spurred reactions far and wide across sports media.

Responding to the USA Today report on Monday, Kiffin doubled down on his belief that people are misinterpreting what he said.

“People don’t read the actual words I used in the article,” Kiffin told USA Today. “I said, ‘A parent said.’ That’s not me saying it as my opinion.”

That distinction may not matter as the SEC weighs its response. From the conference’s perspective, Kiffin publicly disparaged one of its members, causing a news cycle that put the entire SEC in a poor light.

“Any potential sanctions against Kiffin — a public reprimand, a fine or both — will likely be further discussed this week,” USA Today reports.

Kiffin will return to Oxford on September 19 as his LSU Tigers take on Ole Miss in what is sure to be must-watch TV.