By GLENN GUILBEAU, Tiger Rag Editor
Just another day at the beach in the Southeastern Conference.
LSU football coach Lane Kiffin may face a reprimand of some sort from the SEC office, namely commissioner Greg Sankey, for his recent racially related comments about his time at Ole Miss in a Vanity Fair magazine article, according to reports from the SEC Spring Meetings that began Tuesday in Destin, Florida.
“Officials at Ole Miss and the SEC have spoken about a potential reprimand for Kiffin over comments he made, two people close to the situation tell USA TODAY Sports,” USA Today college football writer Matt Hayes writes. Hayes was on Tiger Rag Radio last week.
Kiffin, who left the Ole Miss head coaching job after six seasons last November to become LSU’s coach, is scheduled to speak at the Spring Meetings at 5 p.m. Tuesday.
The SEC office is looking at one anecdote in particular that Kiffin shared in the Vanity Fair article.
“When he was coaching there (at Ole Miss), Kiffin says, top recruits would tell him, ‘Hey, coach, we really like you. But my grandparents aren’t letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi,’” Vanity Fair writer Chris Smith wrote in the feature.
Then Kiffin is quoted as saying, “That doesn’t come up when you say Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 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.’”
SEC has rules against coaches criticizing other SEC coaches. Bylaw 10.2.3 says SEC personnel should “avoid making any derogatory statements concerning another member institution’s athletics program, facilities, or educational opportunities.”
And Bylaw 10.5.2 forbids, “public criticism of other member institutions.”
Kiffin tried to defend himself to Hayes in a USA Today story. “I said, ‘A parent said.’ That’s not me saying it as my opinion,” Kiffin said.
But he did bring it up, regardless of who he is quoting.
Meanwhile, Texas coach Steve Sarkisian took an opposite strategy than Kiffin. He admitted he was wrong to say recently that “All you have to do is take basket weaving, and you can get an Ole Miss degree.”
Sarkisian told reporters in Destin that “that was a poor choice of words on my part.”
The SEC has publicly reprimanded coaches previously without fining them. That happened in 2022 to then Alabama coach Nick Saban and then Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher, who criticized each other’s recruiting tactics at the time.
Both Kiffin, 51, and Sarkisian, 52, rebuilt their careers after previous troubles as head coaches while coaching under Saban at Alabama before becoming head coaches again. So, if Sankey doesn’t make each go sit in the corner, maybe he can have Saban, 74, give the pair a stern lecture.
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