The whole world is ready to boo Lane Kiffin. He’ll eventually get the last laugh – The New York Times

It has been less than a year since a documentary film, produced by ESPN and still streaming there, argued Lane Kiffin had matured.

The film is called “The Many Lives of Lane Kiffin,” and it basically makes the argument that Kiffin, after two decades of relentlessly chaotic nomadism, of switching jobs, of heavy drinking, of constant trolling, of compulsive rakish behavior, of smirking superiority, of basically Being Lane Kiffin, had at last found his place of calm, normalcy and permanence in Oxford, Miss.

“I didn’t know I needed Ole Miss more than Ole Miss needed me,” said the guy who, a month later, was the betting favorite for jobs at both Florida and LSU and, two months later, after family visited both places, responded to a reporter’s question about whether he would leave the school he’d just sent to the College Football Playoff by saying he had “a lot of praying to do to figure that out tomorrow.”

Forty-eight hours later, he was on his way to LSU, a move so downright dastardly that it escaped college football containment and became a topic for morning shows, People magazine and TMZ. In his first interview, he said, “I know there’s a lot of feelings and emotions right now. I hope when they settle down that there’s an appreciation about what we were able to do here and having the best run that’s ever been done in the history of the school.”

This is a little like divorcing your spouse and telling them, as they weep in front of you, that they shouldn’t be sad, that they were actually lucky to have ever been married to someone as charming and attractive as you in the first place — that someday, they’ll look back and maybe even thank you.

This is Mephistophelian behavior — real-deal supervillain stuff. And that was, of course, before Kiffin went so far in flouting the rules of his sport by attempting to add NFL players to his roster — something every person in college football was actively screaming at him not to do — that the commissioner of the SEC threatened to throw his school out of the conference entirely. Kiffin is the most hated man in college football by any earthly measure, something everyone watching at home will get to witness in full 4K from 64,000 howling souls in Oxford this Saturday evening when he returns with No. 7 LSU to play No. 8 Ole Miss.

But I bet Lane has the last laugh. We hate Lane, we make our peace with Lane, we hate him again, and on and on, as long as we never take our eyes off him. Lane Kiffin knows the fundamental truth that we all know as college football fans but do our best to ignore: The only thing that matters is winning. Lane Kiffin does not have to worry about being held to account because all that he is accountable for is winning.

In his fantastic just-released biography of Kiffin, “Lane Being Lane,” John Talty, through interviews with hundreds of Kiffin associates (and a very brief one with Lane himself), paints a surprising portrait of Kiffin: He’s chronically ill at ease, socially awkward and more than a little bit weird around other human beings. That brashness we see, Talty argues, is more him thinking that’s how he’s supposed to pretend to act in public than who Kiffin actually is.

One “friend” tells Talty that Kiffin is only comfortable in his own skin when he’s coaching a game and when he’s trolling people on Twitter: He doesn’t like to be around anyone. Kiffin walks around the world like he’s the only one in it; in his mind, he’s not so much the Main Character of Football as the Only Character on Earth. In Talty’s telling, Kiffin has a removed, almost siloed view of the planet where nothing exists outside of what his desires might be at that specific second in time. There is no pause or space between I want this thing and I’m going to go get it right now.

Which, it must be said, puts him more in step with the current cultural moment than out of it.

Kiffin is someone who acts on an impulse that is consistently moral-neutral (or even moral-indifferent), which is a problem if you’re the CEO of a company that will sell out every customer to maximize the bottom line (or, say, a world leader) but … doesn’t strike me as the worst worldview for the coach of a big-time college football program to have at this particular instant. The one constant of Kiffin’s life and career — forged in large part because of his father’s career in coaching, which featured a stunning 16 different jobs, the sort of travelogue that might make a man like Lane believe the only person you can really worry about making happy is yourself — has been that you have to do whatever it takes to win and not care one whit what anyone else thinks about it. Kiffin may be hated by his peers for doing what they deem cheating or going against the spirit of why they got into college football, but to Kiffin, those thoughts may as well not exist.

All that matters is what he wants.

There is something — and this is a strange word to use considering who we’re talking about — honest about this. However much everyone else who loves college football would like to tell themselves otherwise, the engine that drives college football is, and surely always was, winning. Amos Alonzo Stagg could claim college football was a step closer to divinity, but if he hadn’t won 314 games, no one would have listened or cared. Kiffin values only himself, and he knows he gets everything he wants if he wins, so he does everything to win. Ole Miss loved him when he was winning games there and hated him when he went somewhere else to win them. Had he lost games for the Rebels in the first place, they wouldn’t have even bothered hating him. They’d just move on to somebody else.

This is hardly an indictment of Ole Miss. There is not a fan alive who does not think this way. Mark Richt, the former Georgia coach, is one of the kindest people you will meet. No Georgia fan, after the two national championships Kirby Smart gave them that Richt never could, misses him. This is how this works.

No one stays anywhere. Why should Kiffin feel like he has to? As long as he wins, he gets to be in charge of his destiny. Which is all he has ever wanted. Isn’t it what most of us want?

Which is why, I suspect, we’ll all end up coming back around on Lane. He understands us better than we understand ourselves — what this sport is, what we value, what, ultimately, endures. Lane seems to know this too. This is not a man who carries himself with much chastened remorse. That Lane twinkle in his eye, the “I’m gonna get away with this” rictus grin, can be seen just as clearly in his “Imagine if we had pro players?” halftime interview as it is in the Dr Pepper commercial in which, yuk yuk yuk, Lane got pulled over for breaking the rules again.

You can’t keep doing this, Brian Bosworth tells us. But of course he can. And in the same way that all incorrigibles can’t help but grow more respectable as they get older — I swear, there was a time when President H.W. Bush called Ice-T “sick” and a “poison.” He’s now on a Honey Nut Cheerios box — Kiffin will end up outlasting our hate for him. The game will change, the rules will evolve, some new whippersnapper will take over and start flouting all the rules in the name of winning just like Kiffin used to, and Kiffin will end up feeling ahead of his time, the way so many once-villains end up doing, after they’ve been successful enough that our gravity has shifted toward them, that they don’t seem so bad anymore … that what we once called rampant norm-breaking megalomania turned out to predict the future.

Kiffin may be college football’s monster. But he’s our monster: We created him. He just reflects ourselves back to us. And eventually, as the years go on, he won’t feel abnormal at all.

The whole world is going to boo Lane Kiffin this weekend. It will feel fantastic. But then we’ll move on to something else. Kiffin knows it. He knows all he has to do is keep winning, and he can do whatever he wants. And that’s why he’ll never, ever stop.