Peter Burns watched Ole Miss beat Georgia in the Sugar Bowl and decided Lane Kiffin’s chaotic, self-serving exit actually made the Rebels better.

“I’d argue Lane leaving the way he did & everything since has absolutely helped Ole Miss,” Burns wrote on X. “Created more a team environment & sometimes when there’s so much outside noise….the task at hand (winning games) become a welcome safe harbor. + LSU got a HELL of a coach in Lane. Win/Win.”

I’d argue Lane leaving the way he did & everything since has absolutely helped Ole Miss.

Created more a team environment & sometimes when there’s so much outside noise….the task at hand (winning games) become a welcome safe harbor.

+ LSU got a HELL of a coach in Lane.

Win/Win https://t.co/Hm2Z6qbS0d

— Peter Burns (@PeterBurnsESPN) January 6, 2026

That’s one way to spin it. Here’s another: a coach abandoned his team two days after Thanksgiving, took most of his offensive staff with him to a rival program, left those same assistants in a position where they’re simultaneously recruiting for LSU while coaching Ole Miss in the playoff, and the SEC Network host thinks the whole fiasco helped create a better team environment.

The problem with Burns’s win-win narrative is that it requires ignoring what actually happened over the past month. And it requires pretending that Ole Miss’s success proves Kiffin did them a favor by leaving, when the actual evidence suggests Ole Miss is succeeding in spite of the mess he created.

Start with the most obvious detail: Pete Golding beat Georgia. Lane Kiffin didn’t.

This is an insane take…

…except Lane didn’t beat Georgia and Golding did. So sure, why not https://t.co/suSdJQg5AW

— Steven Godfrey (@38Godfrey) January 6, 2026

The Bulldogs handed Kiffin his only regular-season loss back in October, winning 43-35 in Athens. Then Golding took over as interim head coach after Kiffin bailed for LSU, and Ole Miss beat that same Georgia team 39-34 in the Sugar Bowl to advance to the semifinal. If Kiffin’s departure really created this magical team environment that helped Ole Miss win, it’s strange that the actual proof is Ole Miss succeeding in a game Kiffin himself lost.

Burns’s argument hinges on the idea that Kiffin’s departure galvanized Ole Miss by giving them a common enemy and eliminating distractions. That makes sense if you ignore everything that actually happened.

Ole Miss has six LSU-bound assistants coaching the team through the playoff. Those assistants are simultaneously helping Ole Miss game-plan for Miami in the semifinal while also recruiting players to follow them to Baton Rouge. Multiple Ole Miss sources told Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger that tampering concerns are real, even from within their own walls. Kiffin himself called those assistants back to LSU for a couple of days last week, causing them to miss Ole Miss meetings and a walkthrough before returning mid-week to prep for Georgia.

None of that stopped Ole Miss from beating Georgia. But that doesn’t mean it helped.

Burns wants to give Kiffin credit for creating a rallying point. The problem is that Kiffin also created all the problems Ole Miss had to rally against. He left. He took the staff. He put those assistants in an impossible position where they’re coaching one team while recruiting for another. And he’s collecting $500,000 bonuses from LSU based on Ole Miss’s playoff wins — wins that happened in games he’s not coaching.

LSU did get a hell of a coach in Lane Kiffin. He’s proven he can build elite offenses and win 10-plus games at Ole Miss, a program that hadn’t done that consistently in 50 years. But pretending this whole situation worked out perfectly for everyone involved requires ignoring the month of chaos, the conflicted assistants, the tampering concerns, and the fact that Golding accomplished something Kiffin couldn’t.

If that’s a win-win, it’s only because Ole Miss was good enough to win in spite of everything Kiffin put them through.