Lane Kiffin went viral last week for inflammatory comments, as he is prone to do. Except this time, the comments didn’t come during a press conference, or on a podcast, or via Kiffin’s extremely active personal X/Twitter account.
Instead, they were tucked into the final paragraphs of a nearly 3,000-word profile on the LSU head football coach, published May 11 by Vanity Fair. The writer of the piece, Vanity Fair contributing editor Chris Smith, said he spent more than four hours on campus with Kiffin in April—a rare level of access to one of the biggest names in college sports.
And it paid off.
During their time together, Kiffin recounted certain difficulties he had when trying to recruit Black athletes to his former school, Ole Miss: “‘Hey, coach, we really like you. But my grandparents aren’t letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi,” was a common refrain, he 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.’”
The quote instantly spurred a wave of memes, backlash, and general commentary from all corners of the sports media universe. At the time of writing, Vanity Fair’s post on X sharing it (alongside a link to the full article) has nearly 11 million views.
