For the last 10 days, as the regular season of college football has come to a close, a rumbling earthquake has been building — the main tremor of which struck, with a ground zero in Oxford, Mississippi, on Sunday. The Ole Miss Rebels’ head coach, Lane Kiffin, who may have built the most overachieving team in college football history with this year’s playoff-bound 11-1 club that was picked to finish in the middle of the pack in the SEC, opted to flip his allegiance to LSU. And the reaction to Kiffin’s departure has been… well… “It’s just so typical of Lane Kiffin to do something so utterly destructive…Lane Kiffin trying to blame others, trying to blame the adult in the room is so comical.” – Paul Finebaum pic.twitter.com/QVIqAcPNBc — Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) December 1, 2025 Lane Kiffin should leave Ole Miss the same way he’s left every other job: chased out of town by a large mob carrying torches and clubs — Clue Heywood (@ClueHeywood) November 29, 2025 Ole Miss fans saying goodbye to Lane Kiffin as he bolts for LSU pic.twitter.com/fAMJeMveUa — Shooter McGavin (@ShooterMcGavin) November 30, 2025 No, really. This is what it looked like at the airport in Oxford as Kiffin, his family, and a few members of his coaching and support staff boarded a pair of private jets for a trip to the new professional destination… Lane Kiffin getting on the plane at the Oxford AirPort. 4 coaches in total. @cadesmith_3 @YancyPorter @MartySmithESPN pic.twitter.com/1uiXx4DWiC — Les Goh (@GohLes1) November 30, 2025 The utterly insane reaction by Ole Miss’s fans to the defection of the most successful football coach they’ve had since Johnny Vaught is actually quite understandable. And absolutely awesome. We’ll get to that in a minute. What needs to be understood is that there really aren’t any bad guys here. You might say Kiffin is the villain, but he isn’t. He was offered a better job than the one he had. Of course, he took it. Just like Tommy Tuberville left Ole Miss for Auburn years ago. LSU is a place where three different football coaches (Nick Saban in 2003, Les Miles in 2007, and Ed Orgeron in 2019) have won national championships this century, matching Ohio State as the only school with such a distinction. Its athletic budget and fan base dwarf that of Ole Miss. (RELATED: Fourth and Funded: College Football’s Fiscal Fumble) And LSU is in a unique situation compared to virtually every other major program, in that it is the only high-major athletic department in a state that produces a prodigious number of NFL prospects in its high schools. The other FBS schools in the state, specifically UL-Lafayette, Louisiana Tech, and Tulane, don’t even bother recruiting players LSU recruits — and Tulane might well win the AAC title on Friday and make the playoffs with a roster 31 percent of which comes from Louisiana, which should give you an indication of just how much football talent the state produces. Another data point: Four of the NFL’s best wide receivers — Brian Thomas Jr., Malik Nabers, Ja’Mar Chase, and Justin Jefferson — are LSU alumni who went to high school within 75 miles of LSU’s campus. Jefferson wasn’t even a blue-chip recruit; LSU signed him as an afterthought over the summer before the 2017 season. Nabers was committed to Mississippi State until a week before National Signing Day; LSU offered him late after a pair of more highly sought-after players from out of state flipped to other schools. At Ole Miss, Kiffin has to fight Mississippi State for the best in-state recruits, and he doesn’t always win. In fact, of the players ranked in 247 Sports’ Top 10 in Mississippi since Kiffin arrived in 2020, Ole Miss has never gotten more than half of the state’s top 10. That was in 2024, which was the only year Kiffin got more Mississippi Top 10 recruits than State did. Instead, he’s had to master recruiting in the transfer portal, which he does better than anyone else in college football. (RELATED: Figures Flip the Field) There’s a reason why, as Kiffin said Monday in his initial LSU press conference, his mentors, Pete Carroll and Nick Saban, both told him to jump on the opportunity to coach at LSU. He now has a contract that pays him the second-highest salary in college football, with incentives that would jump Georgia’s Kirby Smart to No. 1 based on performance. Is Kiffin a bad guy for not staying loyal to Ole Miss? Well, loyalty isn’t much of a thing in hyper-competitive SEC football. Just ask David Cutcliffe, who had a great run as the Rebels’ head coach but was packed off to the unemployment line after one bad season, the year after Eli Manning left for the NFL. Or Houston Nutt, who won a pair of Cotton Bowls in his first two years and was summarily canned after two bad seasons to follow. Kiffin is the son of Monte Kiffin, the long-time NFL assistant coach who had 20 different stops in his coaching career — what he knows is that his profession is one of the most nomadic in all of American labor. He was fired after just 20 games as the head coach of the Raiders, and he was dumped midseason as the head coach at USC after a career record of 28-15 when he was 3-2. Are you really going to preach to him about loyalty? LSU isn’t the villain. LSU is now on its third head coach since that last national championship in 2019, and the commitment of its community, from boosters to athletic department officials to its board and even the state’s governor, Jeff Landry, to reclaiming its spot at the top is absolute. Orgeron imploded for lots of reasons, many of them having little or nothing to do with football, after winning that title, and his successor, Brian Kelly, carried a gaudy resume and massive $95 million contract into the job. But despite having been given every possible resource, the former Notre Dame coach was disengaged and checked out, and he was fired eight games into this season when it was obvious he was a poor investment. Kelly’s $54 million buyout, the second-worst in college football history, is a monument not just to bad judgment but to the commitment of LSU to winning in college football. (RELATED: The $40 Million Mulligan) And the athletic director who gave Kelly that contract was very publicly canned for it, after a public tongue-lashing by Landry for having negotiated it. And no, Ole Miss isn’t the villain. Ole Miss is the victim. The exceptional cattiness of the Rebel Nation online and the vulgar display at the airport — and worse, the apparent fact that somebody tried to run Kiffin and his son off the road on their way to catch that plane on Sunday — aside, you really can’t help but sympathize with Ole Miss for the cruel way this transition played out. Because after all, this is the best season for Ole Miss’s football program in modern history, and it’s just been blown up by Kiffin leaving. That’s absolutely unjust and it’s awful. Kiffin’s departure dragged out all through the Thanksgiving weekend because he and Ole Miss’s athletic director, Keith Carter, and the school’s chancellor, Glenn Boyce, spent their time in a fascinating negotiation over how it would be done. The coach insisted that he be allowed to coach the team through the playoff run on his way out. That wasn’t altogether an altruistic offer — the longer he hung around the Ole Miss program, the greater the opportunity he’d have to poach assistant coaches and players for LSU next year. All the same, what he was offering was the best opportunity the school would have in the foreseeable future to win a national championship. Boyce and Carter rebuffed him, something even Kiffin admitted was a completely reasonable position to take. And Ole Miss, having fought to convince Kiffin not to leave for more than a week when it was clear he was going, promoted defensive coordinator Pete Golding to Kiffin’s job on Sunday. Kiffin, meanwhile, poached most of his offensive staff and a huge chunk of the support staff and brought them to Baton Rouge, leaving Golding to scramble to assemble a crew to coach the playoffs. Yes, it’s a mess. It’s a mess none of the three parties created — the culprit here is the NCAA, which has structured a calendar for college football that makes absolutely no sense. Wednesday is National Signing Day, when virtually all of the top senior high school football prospects will ink with the college of their choice. Not having a coach in place before that date is utter suicide for a college program, which is why there were so many in-season firings this year and why Sunday was Decision Day for such a colossal number of coaches. Kiffin wasn’t the only potentially playoff-bound coach to jump from his current team; Tulane’s Jon Sumrall and North Texas’s Eric Morris took jobs at Florida and Oklahoma State, respectively, and they’ll play Friday for the American Athletic Conference championship and a likely playoff bid. Both schools have confirmed they’ll allow their outgoing coaches to stick around for a playoff run; the situations are different than that of Ole Miss, particularly given the Rebels’ rivalry with LSU. That calendar has to be fixed. Saban offered a suggestion for how to fix it, which would be a big improvement… If the early signing day, now in December, were to be moved to before the season as it is in, for instance, basketball, there would be no urgency to complete coaching changes as soon as the regular season is over. If the late signing day were to be moved from early February to some time in March (in basketball, it’s in April), that would leave even more time between the end of the playoffs and the late recruiting season. And if Saban’s suggestion to have the transfer portal open in May were to be taken, the portal wouldn’t have anything to do with coaching changes. And there would be no mechanism for a Kiffinesque exit. Which, let’s face it, has been an utter godsend for college football. You might find the whole thing distasteful, sure — but let’s understand that it’s almost certainly going to be the catalyst for fixing the dysfunctional calendar, and that’s an unalloyed good result if and when it happens. Not to mention, there has been nothing going on anywhere in America more compelling than the Lane Kiffin drama. Not just in sports. Anywhere. But most of all, that scene at the airport in Oxford, nasty though it might have been, has now transformed LSU-Ole Miss from a nice rivalry (Tiger fans yell “Go to hell, Ole Miss!” at Rebel fans, who just as lustily reciprocate, and this has been true for decades) into the premier hate-fest in all of sports. Yankees–Red Sox? Fuhgeddabouddit. Ohio State–Michigan? Meh. Cowboys–Redskins? They aren’t even the Redskins anymore. No. This is the one now. And the game next fall? It’s in Oxford. You can’t get any more awesome than that. And you owe a debt of gratitude to Kiffin. You might not like him — hell, as an LSU fan, I’ve never liked him until a couple of days ago — but he’s given college football a veritable cornucopia of blessings this Thanksgiving, and that needs to be recognized. READ MORE from Scott McKay: Leslie Corbly’s Progressive Prejudice Is a Book Every Christian Should Read We Should Declare War on the Cancerous Cartel in Caracas Five Quick Things: A Bush Family Comeback? Not No. Hell No!