Geez, I love SEC football.

If it wasn’t already on, in a league that promotes itself as just meaning more, it is now.

When I say on, I mean as in a WWE battle royale, NWA bunkhouse stampede (yes, I’m showing my age) and the kind of old-school SEC verbal grenades being tossed by coaches, calculated or not, that light up social media platforms and make the waiting for the 2026 season to begin that much more agonizing.

Hard as it is to believe, Lane Kiffin is in the middle of it all. He’s not the only participant, but in keeping with the pro wrestling theme, he’s the lead heel. And anybody who truly knows Kiffin also knows that he doesn’t mind playing that role in the least bit.

Kiffin was featured in a Vanity Fair spread on Monday and said he struggled to get top recruits to Ole Miss because their grandparents wouldn’t let them move to Oxford, Mississippi, because of the town’s racially fraught past. Kiffin told Vanity Fair that similar concerns have not come up when recruiting players to LSU and added, “Parents were sitting here this weekend saying the campus’ diversity feels so great: ‘It feels like there’s no segregation. And we want that for our kid because that’s the real world.’”

Obviously, those comments went over with the Ole Miss people like the proverbial you know what in a punch bowl.

But then on Tuesday, a USA Today story dropped with Texas’ Steve Sarkisian talking about how out of control the culture was in today’s college football world. In that story, Ole Miss caught yet another stray.

“At Texas, we will only take 50 percent of a player’s academic credit hours,” Sarkisian said. “You may be a semester from graduating, but you’re going all the way back to 50 percent if you play here and want a degree. But at Ole Miss, they can take you. All you have to do is take basket weaving, and you can get an Ole Miss degree.”

First-year Florida coach Jon Sumrall even joined in the “fun” by quote tweeting the story on Sarkisian’s comments on Ole Miss.

“Grateful to coach at a top 10 public university that also offers advanced basket weaving!” Sumrall tweeted, obviously in fun.

Now, for the record, the interview with Sarkisian was conducted back in March by USA Today’s Matt Hayes, so Sarkisian wasn’t piling on after Kiffin’s comments. Also, Kiffin told On3’s Wilson Alexander this week that it wasn’t his intention to cast Ole Miss in a negative light in the Vanity Fair article.

“I really apologize if anybody at Ole Miss or in Mississippi was offended by (his comments in the Vanity Fair article),” Kiffin 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. I was asked questions about the differences in recruiting, and I said a narrative that we battled there from some out-of-state Black parents and grandparents was not wanting their kid to move to Mississippi. That’s a narrative that coaches have been fighting forever.”

Suffice it to say, the damage was already done.

And, now, with the SEC spring meetings on the docket in two weeks, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey has a mess on his hands. He’d better pack his referee’s shirt.

It’s reminiscent of Kiffin’s first tour through the SEC in 2009, when he spent a year at Tennessee.

All these years later, I can still see a red-faced Mike Slive, Sankey’s predecessor, standing there in the lobby of the Sandestin Hilton at the SEC spring meetings. One of the most intelligent and quietly commanding leaders I’ve ever known in college athletics, Slive was pissed. Royally.

Kiffin, soon after getting the Tennessee job, publicly accused then-Florida coach Urban Meyer of cheating and breaking NCAA recruiting rules by calling a recruit who was on a visit at Tennessee, which was not a violation. Slive publicly reprimanded Kiffin for violating what was then SEC Bylaw 10.5.1, which states that coaches and administrators shall refrain from directed public criticism of other member institutions, their staffs or players.

Kiffin later apologized, but there were a few more verbal jabs along the way involving Kiffin and Meyer during the following months, and even then-South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier joined the fray – to nobody’s surprise.

Slive, who died in 2018, had heard enough. That was precisely his message to coaches when they gathered in a crowded room that spring at the league meetings – enough!

“I even swore, and I never swear,” Slive told me sheepishly. He never mentioned any coach by name during that fiery meeting, but was staring daggers through Kiffin the whole time.

In my experience, Sankey is also not prone to swearing, but his message to coaches and athletic directors in two weeks will nonetheless be interesting.

The rest of the college football world will be watching too. As one longtime Big Ten insider told me, “The Big Ten has won three straight national championships, and now we’ve got fan bases in the SEC arguing about whose state is the most racist.”

That may be one way to look at it, especially given the SEC’s national title drought after winning 13 of the 17 national championships (five different schools) from 2006-2022. Two different schools, Alabama and Georgia, won back-to-back titles in that stretch, and the SEC won seven straight titles from 2006-12.

But with the advent of the transfer portal and NIL, this is a different era. The talent is now more spread out, and the schools and fan bases who spent most of the last two decades being the SEC’s punching bags will tell you gleefully that the SEC has lost its fastball, particularly with the SEC going to nine league games in 2026.

As Sankey told me in March during the SEC men’s basketball tournament, he doesn’t “just submit” that the SEC has fallen behind and won’t continue to win titles. He pointed out that Alabama lost in overtime in the 2023 semifinals, Texas lost in the fourth quarter in the 2024 semifinals on a play near the goal line that turned the game around and that Ole Miss lost in the semifinals a year ago after a pass into the end zone fell incomplete on the last play of the game.

Either way, Sankey now has coaches punching at each other within his own conference, and Ole Miss had already taken some glancing blows from outside the league. Before this latest flurry, Clemson’s Dabo Swinney detailed widespread tampering allegations against the Rebels in January, including head coach Pete Golding texting Luke Ferrelli, a transfer linebacker from Cal, while he was in class at Clemson and asking him about the amount of his buyout. Swinney said Golding even sent a photo of a $1 million contract offer to Ferrelli, who was back in the portal a few days later and ended up at Ole Miss. Sources told On3 that Ole Miss also has evidence of several other schools tampering with its players and that the NCAA is looking into Swinney’s allegations. Swinney told On3’s Brett McMurphy on Monday that he’s heard “nothing” from the NCAA.

There’s an old saying that there’s no such thing as negative publicity, and one coach on the Ole Miss staff suggested that there might be a different way to look at some of these strays the Rebels are catching after winning 13 games a year ago and coming within a game of playing for the national championship. Ole Miss was the only SEC team to make the College Football Playoff semifinals last season.

“You never insult down, only up so that you can drag someone down to your level,” the coach said. “All these attacks on Ole Miss are a reflection that we are a threat to them. People only talk about you when you’re relevant.”

The toxicity surrounding Kiffin’s messy exit at Ole Miss was already boiling over, but his racially tinged comments – however he meant them – and the fact that he made those comments after leaving Ole Miss for LSU really touched a nerve in and around the Ole Miss community. After all, Ole Miss was able to attract numerous coveted Black prospects to campus on his watch, transfers and high school recruits. Among them: Walter Nolen, Princely Umanmielen, Kewan Lacy, Tre Harris, Juice Wells, Zach Evans, Jared Ivey, Trey Amos, De’Zhaun Stribling, Suntarine Perkins and Kam Franklin. Kiffin’s last two high school signing classes at Ole Miss were ranked No. 19 and No. 20 nationally. His first class at LSU in 2026 was ranked No. 12, and the 2027 class is currently No. 10 with two five-star commitments.

Some in the media have defended Kiffin and said he wasn’t necessarily lying about the challenges of trying to recruit Black players to Ole Miss and pointed out that it wasn’t until 2020 that Mississippi removed the Confederate battle emblem from its state flag. Prior to his first season at Ole Miss in 2020, Kiffin took part in a unity walk with athletes and coaches from various sports in support of having a Confederate monument on Ole Miss’ campus moved.

But across the Deep South, it’s impossible to whitewash the ugly history of racism and its remnants. And what was particularly troublesome to longtime Ole Miss supporters about Kiffin’s comments was the way they say he took aim at Ole Miss only after resurrecting his SEC head coaching career on the back of Ole Miss, which took a chance on him after Kiffin himself said that SEC schools weren’t lining up and knocking at his door. Ole Miss had produced just three 10-win seasons going back to 1970 before Kiffin arrived. He won 10 or more games in four of his five full seasons at Ole Miss.

It’s also worth noting, as Wilson Alexander wrote in his On3 story on Tuesday, that Baton Rouge has an often ugly racial history of its own that the city has grappled with for years. The origin of LSU’s mascot, the Tigers, comes from a Confederate military unit. Ironically enough, WAFB in Baton Rouge aired a news story Monday that state lawmakers are considering a bill that could move Confederate monuments that have been taken down in Louisiana to state parks, where they would be on display.

In South Carolina, the Confederate battle flag flew atop the State Capitol from 1961-2000 and then moved to a 30-foot pole on the State House grounds. The flag was finally removed from the grounds in 2015. Steve Spurrier was adamant that the flag should be removed entirely from the time he took the South Carolina job in 2005.

“I realize I’m not supposed to get in the political arena as a football coach, but if anybody were ever to ask me about that damn Confederate flag, I would say we need to get rid of it,” Spurrier said while coaching at South Carolina. “I’ve been told not to talk about that. But if anyone were ever to ask me about it, I certainly wish we could get rid of it.”

So picking and choosing when to point a finger at schools in the Deep South over the level of racism that has existed in those states over the years is unfair. Again, there’s shame to go around, not just at Ole Miss, which has worked diligently to distance itself from the Confederate imagery that has long been attached to that university.

Ole Miss legend Archie Manning, when reached Tuesday by On3, declined to discuss Kiffin or the fallout from his comments specifically, but said. “I’m very proud of my school. My school had to make changes years ago and did. I know so many people who send their kids to Ole Miss that have a great experience. It’s my school and always will be.”

Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter, who hired Kiffin, has not commented publicly about Kiffin’s comments or Sarkisian’s comments, but sources told On3 that there have already been discussions among Ole Miss administrators and SEC officials.

Of note, Ole Miss officials want to know if current SEC Bylaws 10.2.3 or 10.5.2 were violated.

Bylaw 10.2.3 states: “Coaches and staff are required to advocate for the positive attributes of their own university and must avoid making derogatory statements about another member institution’s program, facilities, or education opportunities.”

Bylaw 10.5.2 states: “Coaches and administrators are strictly forbidden from public criticism of other member institutions, their staffs, or players.”

SEC officials, when asked Tuesday by On3 for comment, said there was nothing to report at this point.

Last month, Carter conducted a wide-ranging interview with On3 in his office at Ole Miss and discussed, among other things, Kiffin’s exit at Ole Miss, this interview coming well before the publication of the Vanity Fair story. Carter said he last talked to Kiffin for “about 45 seconds” in February at the SEC meeting for head coaches and athletic directors in New Orleans.

“Lane did an incredible job here, and I mean an incredible job,” said Carter, who hired Kiffin despite some pushback among prominent Ole Miss supporters. “You can’t ever discount that or deny that. He’s just not good at leaving places. He wanted it both ways, to leave for LSU and also be able to coach in the playoff. That was never going to happen. What’s interesting is if he would have left the right way, there would’ve been a lot of frustration among fans with our administration: Why in the world could we not get this done? Did we not pay enough money? Did we not do enough with NIL? A lot of obvious questions fans are going to ask. But by the time he left, people were like, ‘Screw him. Let him go.’

“I hate it from that perspective, because at the end of the day, if he wanted to go to LSU, that’s fine. Go to LSU, but leave us alone. But because you don’t get what you wanted in being able to coach in the playoff, don’t try to burn us down on the way out and then continue to try to burn us down behind the scenes. That was the most frustrating part and the most disappointing part of the way it all ended.”

The SEC spring meetings have been known to be boring. Not this year.

Consider it an appetizer for the season. If you haven’t already, you might want to circle the below dates:

Sept. 19: LSU at Ole Miss.

Oct. 24: Ole Miss at Texas.

Nov. 21: LSU at Tennessee.

I can’t think of anything in my time of covering the SEC that rises to the level of the nastiness that will engulf Kiffin’s return to Oxford in Week 3. Here’s betting he won’t refrain from tweeting that week either.

And remember when the storyline surrounding Ole Miss’ visit to Texas was going to be Arch Manning going against his grandfather, father and uncle’s alma mater? Not anymore.

Can’t forget about the trip to Tennessee either. The last time Kiffin was in Knoxville as a head coach, all hell broke loose. The 2021 game in his second season at Ole Miss had to be stopped for 20 minutes while fans hurled everything from water bottles, to mustard bottles, even a golf ball that hit him after a call by the officials didn’t go the Vols’ way.

The real season can’t get here soon enough, and something says the appetizers will only get yummier, or yuckier, depending on your locale.