Presented by AR’s Hot Honey
For the last two days, while filling in for Chris “Mad Dog” Russo on Sirius XM’s Mad Dog Radio, I’ve spent a whole lot of time talking about college football.
And, really, one story in particular:
Lane Kiffin vs. the SEC.
So it was only fitting that Kiffin himself joined me today.
Lane came on while representing Dr Pepper, as he appears in Season 9 of Fansville, but considering everything happening around LSU right now, there was plenty of actual football business to discuss.
And Kiffin didn’t duck it.
“Here comes the cost of it.”
The latest controversy surrounds LSU players including Dequan Wright and the ongoing eligibility fight involving athletes who previously signed professional contracts.
Kiffin’s argument is pretty simple: LSU didn’t create this situation. The players entered the portal after a court ruling opened the door for them to play college sports, multiple schools recruited them, and LSU won the recruiting battle.
Kiffin told me:
“I talk to our players all the time that there’s a cost and benefit to everything. Being at LSU and making the changes that we made over a year, you go places and people get upset when you leave. And that spotlight comes in anything we do.”
That last part is important.
Anything LSU does right now is going to get attention.
Kiffin said these players weren’t sitting around waiting for LSU to discover some secret loophole. Other programs were recruiting them, too.
“There were all kinds of teams recruiting these kids once they were in the portal. They had at one time signed pro contracts and things like that. But they were in the portal. They had been cleared through a court order that they were allowed to be signed and play college, so we recruited them like many other people.”
Then came the most Kiffin part of the answer.
He essentially told his staff what was coming before it happened.
“I said, ‘Here will be what will happen, guys. We’ll probably be the first one where they choose us.’ It’s not like we’re the first ones who offered them, but they chose us. We won.”
And winning the recruitment meant accepting what came next.
“When a top player chooses you, you say, ‘OK, that’s great.’ And then here comes the cost of it. OK, all the spotlight and them making rules, trying to make rules, for them not to be able to play.”
There it is.
That’s the tension I’ve been talking about all week.
LSU and Kiffin are going to push. The SEC and the rest of college football are going to push back. And every time LSU finds an advantage inside this rapidly changing sport, the question is going to become whether the rules should change to eliminate that advantage.
Kiffin says this is bigger than football
There was another part of Kiffin’s answer that I thought was particularly interesting.
He believes the national conversation has become too focused on LSU football when the underlying legal question potentially impacts athletes across college sports.
“The one thing people aren’t focusing on, everyone’s talking about the football players, but there are all kinds of sports in this around the country.”
Kiffin pointed to athletes from the 2022 recruiting class seeking additional eligibility and said more than 30 athletes involved in this particular case come from different sports.
He specifically mentioned softball players who signed professional contracts before deciding they wanted to return to college.
“So this is a court order where a judge is saying this is the right thing to do for the kids in all these different sports and let them play.”
You can argue about where college eligibility should begin and end.
You can argue that professional contracts should represent a bright line that college athletes shouldn’t be allowed to cross and then come back.
But Kiffin’s broader point deserves attention.
This isn’t just Lane Kiffin finding players for LSU.
College athletics is once again trying to determine its rules while courts, athletes, conferences and schools are all pulling in different directions.
And LSU happens to be standing right in the middle of it.
Again.
“It bothered me.”
But maybe my favorite answer from Kiffin had nothing to do with eligibility.
I asked him about something much more personal.
Does Lane Kiffin worry about what people think of him?
For years, the answer was apparently yes.
“It bothered me. For years I fought that. I said, ‘That’s not really how I am.’”
That answer fascinated me because Kiffin has become such a character in college football that it’s easy to forget there’s an actual person underneath the public version of Lane Kiffin.
The Twitter posts. The trolling. The coaching moves. The headlines. The controversies.
People have built their own version of Lane.
And for a long time, he tried to fight it.
He told me the people who actually work with him and play for him see something different.
“The people who work with me and the players talk about loving the experience and how I treat them. Football players have told me the most exciting years of their life were playing for me.”
Eventually, Kiffin realized he couldn’t control the larger perception.
“So I don’t worry about it anymore. So much of it is out of your control, and with social media, anyone writes anything and people just think that about you.”
Then came the line that stuck with me:
“It’s kind of freeing that way.”
Maybe that’s the best way to understand Lane Kiffin entering this season at LSU.
He knows people are watching.
He knows people are criticizing.
He knows other programs aren’t going to love every player LSU lands or every boundary his program pushes.
And apparently, he’s done trying to convince everyone to like him.
That could make this version of Lane Kiffin the most interesting one yet.
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