Ole Miss Reels as Lane Kiffin Defects to LSU — SkimNews
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- Lane Kiffin left Ole Miss for LSU just 66 days after a documentary aired portraying how Oxford had "saved his family and maybe even his life," capping Ole Miss's best season in decades including a playoff run
- Kiffin departed Oxford on a Challenger 350 owned by an LSU booster and commercial real estate tycoon, with runway photos and fans screaming curses through a chain-link fence becoming instant Ole Miss iconography
- The SEC filed a lawsuit against LSU naming Kiffin personally after he attempted to sign two former Ole Miss players from NFL rosters, with the grievance burning as hot around Oxford as locals can remember
- An 1891 New York Tribune article documents F.A.P. Barnard, Ole Miss's first chancellor, asking William Tecumseh Sherman to spare the campus during the Civil War — a plea absent from canonical Ole Miss, Sherman, and Barnard histories
- The Ole Miss-LSU rivalry spans 160 years rooted in shared French Louisiana colonial history, the Mississippi River, Highway 61, and figures ranging from Sherman's friendship with Barnard to Billy Cannon, the 1959 Heisman winner born in Neshoba County, Mississippi
- The author buried his late father with one of two Ole Miss buttons — "GEAUX TO HELL LSU" or "ARCHIE'S ARMY" — and 22 years later still cannot remember which one he placed in the grave
Why it matters: After Ole Miss's best season in decades — capped by a playoff run — the program lost its architect to its fiercest rival, and the SEC's lawsuit naming Kiffin personally signals the conference views the move as crossing a competitive line. The bitterness has filtered down to the author's 5-year-old daughter crying over Kiffin's yellow lab being "stolen" and a 13-year-old cousin breaking the family TV at Kiffin's on-screen appearance.
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