I used to think only one man on earth could catch Kiffinitis.
I coined the word back in May, after Lane Kiffin took a cheap shot at the community of Oxford, Mississippi, that rebuilt him. Here’s how I defined Kiffinitis: the incurable condition of total lack of empathy, mixed with an insatiable craving for headlines, drama, and the next big check. Named after the poster child. Once you catch it, it never goes away.
I was wrong about the patient list. Call 911. The governor of Louisiana has it now!
Jeff Landry, who helped lure Kiffin out of Oxford two days after an 11-1 regular season and right before the College Football Playoff, looked at a football game at Ole Miss and decided the Tigers might need military protection. He told ESPN he was “thinking about having to send him (Kiffin) in on an F-16 and maybe the team on a C-130.” Then he floated the National Guard “to protect our team.”
Are you kidding me?
This is a football game in Oxford, not the evacuation of Saigon, D-Day, or a hostage rescue. It is a pair of 2-0 teams, a Saturday night, Vaught-Hemingway Stadium packed to the lights, and a coach coming back to the town he called home until he walked out on a team and a community that trusted him.
Paul Finebaum, who has never needed a translator for Louisiana theater, said it best: the governor “just dropped a barrel of oil on top of a burning fire and walked away to go do whatever governors do in Louisiana.”
I thought Kiffinitis was a one-man disease. I never figured anybody else could catch it. Then the governor of Louisiana walked in talking about fighter jets and troop transports, and proved the condition can spread after all.
Landry also said he hopes for “Southern hospitality.” Fine. Oxford knows the phrase very well. But it will also remember who walked out on the kids who bought the “we’re family” speech, then circled back months later to paint this place as somewhere Black families wouldn’t send a grandson. That wasn’t analysis. That was a man sharpening the edges of his own exit.
Ole Miss athletics director Keith Carter did what grown-ups do. He said he’d “kind of tuned out the governor of Louisiana.” LSU’s Verge Ausberry said he and Carter were trying to be “the adults in the room.” Good. Somebody has to be. Oxford police, the highway patrol, Louisiana State Police, and mounted units all have a plan. They do this for a living. They do not need a Black Hawk over The Grove to prove a point.
Here’s the part that would be funny if it weren’t so revealing. The same political machine that treated a coaching hire like a trophy now wants the rest of us to pretend Oxford is a war zone. It’s the same reflex Kiffin has: if the room isn’t loud enough, pour something on it.
I wrote in May that Kiffin’s fatal flaw is a complete lack of empathy. He couldn’t sit with what he did to those players or leave Oxford without dragging old, outdated stereotypes behind him like a prop. Now the man who helped fetch him is doing the sequel: inflate the danger, center himself, hope the cameras follow his jet instead of the scoreboard.
Oxford doesn’t need a lecture on hospitality or a cartoon of itself from Baton Rouge. Play the game. Protect everybody who walks through the gates. Ole Miss fans should cheer until the place shakes. Then let the scoreboard do the talking.
Saturday night, the adults can handle it. The patients should take a seat.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of SuperTalk Mississippi Media.
