TAMPA — Act III of Personal Growth Lane is underway. Prepare accordingly.
Act I was LSU coach Lane Kiffin giving up alcohol and losing weight. Act II was Lane becoming a yoga zealot, citing an improved perspective on life via early morning sweat-and-stretch sessions. Act III, unveiled here at SEC media days, is Social Media Blackout Lane.
The most enthusiastically/annoyingly online coach in college football says he deleted all his social media apps. It began as a challenge from his son, Knox, in the spring. (“Give Knox a hug for me,” cracked SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, who like many in Kiffin’s orbit has cringed often at Kiffin’s frequently incendiary social media posts.)
Here’s the thing with Personal Growth Lane: Every time he allegedly achieves a new level of maturity, he undermines it by doing something to infuriate and alienate a new group of people. He continually needs a new chapter in his personal narrative because he keeps ending the previous chapter in controversy.
“As I look back over my life, one of the things that has been great is subtracting things as you get older,” Kiffin philosophized Thursday. “I think that’s a big part of growth. Whether that’s diet, whether that’s, in my situation, alcohol, whether that’s things that are subtracted along the way, toxic relationships. …
“It was really interesting to see as I went through [deleting social media] because Knox pushing me to do that, challenging me, allowed me to help other players, friends, coaches to say, man, you should try this sometime because once you remove something from your life, you start to realize how many other people are addicted to it or need it.
“If you don’t see anything all day [on social media], you don’t compare. Because now social media does what? You sit there all day long, and you start to compare your job. You start to compare the city you live in. You start to compare your vacation, your kids, your clothes, your car, your significant other. When you don’t see that all day, you’re free of that comparison.”
Sorry, Lane, but here’s a comparison: He sounds like a more successful college head coach, Connecticut men’s basketball boss Dan Hurley, who is on a continual quest for calm. Hurley has gone to therapy, meditates, lights candles and incense … and then continues to be a howling madman at the slightest provocation during games.
Personal Growth Dan has his limits. I suspect Personal Growth Lane does as well. It’s probably time to stop believing there is a profound new level of enlightenment blossoming within Kiffin’s 51-year-old self.
His messy career has included acrimonious partings from jobs with the Raiders (fired), Tennessee (left after a year), USC (fired), Alabama (pushed out as offensive coordinator during the College Football Playoff) and most recently Mississippi (bailed on a playoff team for a bitter rival). The legion of Lane bashers continues to expand.
In a vacuum, Kiffin’s departure from Ole Miss to LSU was a sensible career move. None other than Nick Saban, Kiffin’s former boss, told him that if his goal is to win championships, it would probably be easier at LSU. But there was no vacuum—he was abandoning the Rebels after an 11–1 regular season and before the school’s first playoff appearance. Hence the fury.
His Ole Miss successor, Pete Golding, pointed out Wednesday that the Kiffin era was very successful, and so far the post-Kiffin Rebels are doing fine. They won two playoff games under Golding, reaching the semifinals, and retained some superstar players for this season. “Everybody won from it,” Golding said. “It’s O.K.”
It’s been O.K. on the field, except it’s not off the field. In a Vanity Fair story in May, Kiffin poured kerosene on the glowing embers of the bridge he burnt leaving Oxford. Discussing Ole Miss’s racial history, he recounted what he said were conversations with families of recruits:
“ ‘Hey, Coach, we really like you, but my grandparents aren’t letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi.’ That doesn't come up when you say Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Parents were sitting here this weekend saying the campus’s diversity feels so great: ‘It feels like there’s no segregation. And we want that for our kid because that’s the real world.’ ”
Kiffin apologized for the comment at the time, but inevitably it became a topic here Thursday.
“I made a challenging decision in change,” Kiffin said of the LSU move. “I thought I could find a way for everybody to understand. Now as I look back later on, that was never going to happen.”
No, it wasn’t. From this honest and accurate observation, Kiffin veered into the Philosophical Lane lane and started talking about … Hulk Hogan.
“When I grew up there were two people that I thought just wouldn’t die—my dad and Hulk Hogan,” he said. “Like, there was no way that Hulk Hogan was ever going to not wrestle and die, and he did. … It just made me reflect. I can’t be so concerned about little things and what people say. You got to make decisions; you got to go with them.”
Lane Kiffin made his decision, and as such he will face a crucible of a return game when LSU plays at Mississippi on Sept. 19. Don’t feel sorry for him when that game comes; he chose the circumstances. And don’t feel overly sure that Act III of Personal Growth Lane guarantees he won’t find more controversy to step in between now and kickoff of that game.
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