Lane Kiffin apologizes for Vanity Fair comments on recruiting Black players to Ole Miss: ‘It wasn’t calculated’

Credit: Matthew Hinton-Imagn Images

Lane Kiffin sat across from Vanity Fair writer Chris Smith for four hours last week and said a lot of things. One of them he spent Monday and Tuesday trying to clean up.

Smith was asking about the ceiling, why LSU made more sense than staying at Ole Miss, whether the money and the history and the program’s profile made winning a national championship more realistic in Baton Rouge than in Oxford. Kiffin’s answer was moving along predictably enough until it wasn’t. He brought up grandparents, the ones who had sat across from him in recruiting visits in living rooms across the South and told him, without much ambiguity, that Oxford, Mississippi was not a place they were prepared to send their grandson to play college football.

“‘Hey, coach, we really like you. But my grandparents aren’t letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi,'” Kiffin told Smith. “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.'”

Smith appeared on Paul Finebaum’s show Monday and said he knew exactly what Kiffin meant the moment he said it, that there was no ambiguity in the room, no need to read between the lines. The next day, after practice, Smith was back in Kiffin’s office. Kiffin told him he did not want it to land as a shot at Ole Miss.

Then, as if to underscore just how much he meant it, he told the exact same story again.

“He added the part about, ‘I don’t want this to sound like a shot at Ole Miss,'” Smith told Finebaum. “But then he told the same anecdote all over again.”

Kiffin also took his apology tour to On3, where he spent considerably more words arriving at the same place.

“I really apologize if anybody at Ole Miss or in Mississippi was offended by that,” he said. “In a four-hour interview, I was asked a lot of questions on a lot of things, and Ole Miss has been wonderful to me and to my family. That’s a narrative that coaches have been fighting forever. It wasn’t calculated by bringing it up.”