By TODD HORNE | Vice President and Executive Editor, Tiger Rag
There are subjects I can approach as an editor, examine from several directions and write about with professional detachment. This is not one of them. I am the father of one child, a 29-year-old daughter named Avery, and I know exactly what would happen inside me if strangers publicly sexualized and humiliated her because they were angry with me.
I would have immense difficulty exercising restraint.
That is the truth before the analysis begins. I would not see banners. I would see people using my daughter’s body and reputation as instruments with which to hurt me. Whatever restraint I eventually found would not come naturally. It would have to fight its way through the oldest and most elemental instinct I possess—the instinct to protect my child.
Lane Kiffin will return to Oxford on Saturday night as LSU’s head football coach. Ole Miss fans have been waiting for him. They believe he abandoned their program after leading the Rebels to the College Football Playoff. They are entitled to boo him, mock him, curse his play-calling and hope his team loses by 40 points. College football has always given its people room for theater, tribalism and unreasonable emotional investment.
But some people in Oxford chose another target. They hung banners containing vulgar sexual claims about Kiffin’s 21-year-old daughter, Landry Kiffin, who remains an Ole Miss student.
That is not rivalry. It is cowardice.
Landry had no control over her father’s decision to leave Ole Miss. She did not negotiate his contract with LSU. She did not decide whether he could remain with the Rebels through the playoff. She did not hire his staff, recruit his players or appear at the podium when he was introduced in Baton Rouge.
She is his daughter. That was enough to make her useful to people looking for the most vulnerable place to insert the knife.
The circumstances already placed her in an almost impossibly awkward position. Landry attends Ole Miss. Her father now coaches LSU. Her boyfriend, Whit Weeks, plays linebacker for LSU. What had been an amusing subplot before last year’s LSU-Ole Miss game has become something darker since Kiffin crossed the rivalry’s dividing line.
The people responsible for those banners understood all of that. They also understood that an attack on Landry could reach Lane Kiffin in a place no insult directed at a football coach ever could. They chose her not despite her lack of involvement, but because of it. Hurting an innocent person was the mechanism.
Glenn Guilbeau reported Landry’s response for Tiger Rag on Thursday. She denied the claims and said she had never met the other person dragged into them. Then she explained the issue with a clarity that should embarrass every adult involved.
“Turning a girl into the punchline of a sexual joke because you’re upset at somebody she’s related to should not be okay,” she said.
It should not require courage for a 21-year-old woman to say that. It should be one of the basic terms of civilized behavior. Yet Landry had to defend herself publicly against anonymous vulgarity created by people who presumably consider themselves loyal representatives of the university she attends.
I keep thinking about Avery.
She is 29 now, an accomplished woman living thousands of miles away and building a life that belongs entirely to her. None of that has weakened the reflex. A daughter does not age beyond the reach of her father’s desire to protect her. The little girl and the grown woman continue to occupy the same place inside him.
If someone wanted to criticize me, there would be no shortage of available material. I have made difficult decisions, taken public positions, challenged powerful institutions and written things that angered people. Come after me. Put my name on the banner. Hold me responsible for every word I have written and every decision I have made.
But leave my daughter out of it.
That is what makes this so difficult to absorb merely as another excess of Southeastern Conference football culture. The people who created those banners did not confront Lane Kiffin. They conscripted his daughter into a fight that was never hers, then reached for sexual humiliation because history has taught cowards that it is one of the easiest ways to punish a woman publicly.
I do not know Lane Kiffin well enough to know what he felt when he saw or heard about the banners. I know only what I would feel. Rage would arrive before judgment. The father would appear before the executive, the editor or the public figure could organize a responsible response.
Restraint under those circumstances would not be weakness, and it would not mean accepting what happened. It would mean forcing yourself to act in the way that best protects your daughter instead of acting in the way that most immediately satisfies your anger. Landry managed that herself. She answered without becoming what the people attacking her wanted her to become. She refused to inherit their shame.
On Saturday night, Lane Kiffin will stand on the visiting sideline at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. Ole Miss fans will pour years of affection, resentment and betrayal into the noise directed at him. That is part of the game, and he knows it.
Landry Kiffin is not part of the game.
She is a daughter, a student and a young woman entitled to move through her own university without being used as sexual ammunition against her father. If our passion for college football cannot preserve something that basic, then the rivalry has not made the sport larger.
It has made all of us smaller.
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