Fall Guy

Lane Kiffin leaving Ole Miss for LSU has turned him into the sports villain of the week. A likely playoff-bound Rebels team gets abandoned for Baton Rouge and the knives come out: “selfish,” “traitor,” “no loyalty.” But honestly, this is just the clearest mirror yet of what college football has become — and what the larger culture already is.

It’s a complete joke to pretend college sports are about anything other than money, leverage, and self-interest in the NIL and transfer-portal era. Players chase the best bag, schools chase the best donors, TV networks chase the best ratings. Coaches are supposed to be different? Why? Because they say “family” in the locker room? The entire ecosystem screams: win a national championship or you’re a failure. When that’s the standard, every decision gets reduced to maximizing brand and paycheck.

The “student-athlete” ideal is basically a marketing slogan at this point. Loyalty has been rebranded as naivety. Stick around too long and people call you complacent; jump to a better opportunity and they call you disloyal. It’s a rigged narrative either way.

And it’s not just a college football problem. Look at who runs the show in politics and corporate America: indecent, narcissistic, morally bankrupt people sit in the highest offices and corner suites. We shrug at CEOs gutting companies for stock pops and politicians selling out basic ethics for attention. Then we suddenly find our moral outrage for…Lane Kiffin taking a better job?

That’s next-level hypocrisy. Fans, media, and administrators helped build this environment. Everyone chases more money, more clout, more wins — and then we act shocked when a coach behaves exactly like the system teaches him to behave. If Kiffin is the villain, he’s the villain this era deserves.