Just when you think you’ve had enough of the cesspool of toxicity that Twitter has become and you are on the verge of swearing for the twentieth-odd time that you are going to cutback the time you spend on Elon Musk’s newest toy, Lane Kiffin and his perpetual shit-eating grin come to the rescue to pull us back from the brink by reminding us all why social media was fun in the first place.
Kiffin may be the Head Football Coach at the University of Mississippi, but as any college football fan with a Twitter account well knows, he has found his true calling as college football’s greatest internet troll. At 48, one might think Lane is growing too old for such juvenile antics, but fortunately for college football fans, his inner 17-year-old still has firm control of his mind. His internet hijinks aren’t for everyone. The more mature college football fans tend to find him infantile and his behavior and approach to life sophomoric. Those of us who don’t take ourselves as seriously and think it’s okay to have a little fun in your life find Kiffin to be a breath of fresh air in a college football landscape far too often characterized by coaches competing with each other for the title of “world’s biggest buzzkill.”
Regardless of where you stand on Kiffin’s twitter shenanigans, you have to respect his willingness to target even the biggest and most respected names in college football. Nick Saban, his former boss at Alabama, is a frequent victim of Kiffin’s troll jobs. For instance, prior to Ole Miss’s matchup with Saban’s Alabama squad last season Kiffin tweeted out a single photo with no caption. At first glance, the photo appeared to be nothing more than a copy of John Talty’s book “The Leadership Secrets of Nick Saban,” but further inspection revealed a sheet of paper entitled “Alabama 2022 Defensive Call Sheet.”
A master at work.
Kiffin is obviously no stranger to Twitter trolling but recent years have also seen him increasingly take his show to television audiences, as we saw after Ole Miss’ 31-28 victory over Texas A&M in College Station last season. In a post-game interview with SEC Network’s Cole Cubelic, Kiffin remarked that “390 yards rushing against a bunch of five stars is pretty good” and then responded to Cubelic’s question about what he would be dressing up as for Halloween by saying “I don’t know. Maybe Jimbo has a Joker outfit for me.”
Again, to be in on the joke, you have to go back to the 2022 offseason when Texas A&M Head Coach Jimbo Fisher called Kiffin a “clown” after the Ole Miss coach remarked that he was unsure “if Texas A&M incurred a luxury tax with how much they paid for their signing class.”
The man is ELITE.
Over the weekend we were treated to Kiffin’s latest Twitter jab directed at an SEC peer after 2025 Florida QB commit Austin Simmons not only announced that he was flipping his recruitment to Ole Miss but that he would also be reclassifying two recruiting cycles ahead and joining the Rebels’ 2023 freshman class.
To announce Simmons’ flip to Ole Miss, Kiffin, of course, took to Twitter in the way only he can.
Again, Kiffin’s true genius is to hide his most savage punches within what ostensibly seems to be a perfectly innocuous tweet or comment, as he did with this utterly brilliant troll job. For those of you unaware, Tom Petty (R.I.P.) was a Gainesville, Florida native which also just so happens to be the home of the University of Florida, the school that Simmons just spurned in favor of Ole Miss.
The man is next level.
Beyond the base hilarity of his trolling, what makes Kiffin’s style of humor so appealing is the innocent mischief inherent in it all. He is not your typical troll that pollutes the Twitterverse with vile personal insults designed to poison the public discourse and degrade those he targets. Instead, he opts for harmless, playful jabs that even those he targets cannot help but crack a smile at.
Whether Kiffin’s style of humor is your cup of tea or not, it is impossible to not recognize that he is a true unicorn in the college sports landscape. He is quite simply one of one and there has to be something to appreciate in that. The Ole Miss coach is admittedly a polarizing figure, but love him or hate him, you have to admit that he consistently delivers a dose of lighthearted fun into a sport dominated by intense passions and, in the process, reminds us that at their core sports are supposed to be fun, after all.