Football <\/p>\n
It has been less than a year since a documentary film, produced by ESPN and still streaming there<\/a>, argued Lane Kiffin had matured.<\/p>\n The film is called \u201cThe Many Lives of Lane Kiffin,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t know I needed Ole Miss more than Ole Miss needed me<\/a>,\u201d 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\u2019s question about whether he would leave the school he\u2019d just sent to the College Football Playoff by saying he had \u201ca lot of praying to do to figure that out tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a> and TMZ<\/a>. In his first interview<\/a>, he said, \u201cI know there\u2019s a lot of feelings and emotions right now. I hope when they settle down that there\u2019s an appreciation about what we were able to do here and having the best run that\u2019s ever been done in the history of the school.\u201d<\/p>\n This is a little like divorcing your spouse and telling them, as they weep in front of you, that they shouldn\u2019t be sad, that they were actually lucky to have ever been married to someone as charming and attractive as you in the first place \u2014 that someday, they\u2019ll look back and maybe even thank you.<\/p>\n Why are LSU fans unequivocally behind Lane Kiffin?<\/p>\n Chris Branch<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This is Mephistophelian behavior \u2014 real-deal supervillain stuff. And that was, of course, before <\/em>Kiffin went so far in flouting the rules of his sport by attempting to add NFL players<\/a> to his roster \u2014 something every person in college football was actively screaming at him not to do \u2014 that the commissioner of the SEC threatened to throw his school out of the conference<\/a> entirely<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n 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 <\/em>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.<\/p>\n In his fantastic just-released biography of Kiffin, \u201cLane Being Lane<\/a>,\u201d John Talty, through interviews with hundreds of Kiffin associates (and a very brief one with Lane himself), paints a surprising portrait of Kiffin: He\u2019s 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\u2019s how he\u2019s supposed to pretend to act in public than who Kiffin actually is.<\/p>\n One \u201cfriend\u201d tells Talty that Kiffin is only comfortable in his own skin when he\u2019s coaching a game and when he\u2019s trolling people on Twitter: He doesn\u2019t like to be around anyone. Kiffin walks around the world like he\u2019s the only one in it; in his mind, he\u2019s not so much the Main Character of Football<\/a> as the Only Character on Earth. In Talty\u2019s 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 <\/em>and I\u2019m going to go get it right now. <\/em><\/p>\n Which, it must be said, puts him more in step with the current cultural moment than out of it.<\/p>\n Kiffin is someone who acts on an impulse that is consistently moral-neutral (or even moral-indifferent), which is a problem if you\u2019re the CEO of a company that will sell out every customer to maximize the bottom line (or, say, a world leader) but \u2026 doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s life and career \u2014 forged in large part because of his father\u2019s career in coaching, which featured a stunning 16 <\/em>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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n All that matters is what he wants.<\/p>\n There is something \u2014 and this is a strange word to use considering who we\u2019re talking about \u2014 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\u2019t 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\u2019t have even bothered hating him. They\u2019d just move on to somebody else.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n No one stays anywhere. Why should Kiffin feel like he has to? As long as he wins, he <\/em>gets to be in charge of his destiny. Which is all he has ever wanted. Isn\u2019t it what most of us want?<\/p>\n Which is why, I suspect, we\u2019ll all end up coming back around on Lane. He understands us better than we understand ourselves \u2014 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 \u201cI\u2019m gonna get away with this\u201d rictus grin, can be seen just as clearly in his \u201cImagine if we had pro players<\/a>?\u201d halftime interview as it is in the Dr Pepper commercial in which, yuk yuk yuk, Lane got pulled over for breaking the rules again.<\/p>\n You can\u2019t keep doing this, <\/em>Brian Bosworth\u00a0tells us. <\/em>But of course he can. And in the same way that all incorrigibles can\u2019t help but grow more respectable as they get older \u2014 I swear, there was a time when President H.W. Bush called Ice-T \u201csick<\/a>\u201d and a \u201cpoison.\u201d He\u2019s now on a Honey Nut Cheerios box<\/a> \u2014 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\u2019ve been successful enough that our gravity has shifted toward them, that they don\u2019t seem so bad anymore \u2026 that what we once called rampant norm-breaking megalomania turned out to predict the future.<\/p>\n Kiffin may be college football\u2019s monster. But he\u2019s our monster: We created him. He just reflects ourselves back to us. And eventually, as the years go on, he won\u2019t feel abnormal at all.<\/p>\n The whole world is going to boo Lane Kiffin this weekend. It will feel fantastic. But then we\u2019ll 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\u2019s why he\u2019ll never, ever stop.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n