Thursday night's Mississippi-Georgia game was one of those seminally batshit evenings in a sport that generally likes to wallow in its own self-parodic seriousness, and not just because nobody could seem to figure out when it was supposed to end. The stage upon which the Rebels were supposed to receive the Sugar Bowl trophy after outpunching the Bulldogs came to resemble the 1982 Stanford Band in its ability to enter, leave, and then re-enter the field of play—twice—before the game could actually be declared officially over. This was hilarious enough, and the stock shots of happy Mississippi players interspersed with shots of Mississippi players getting annoyed that they couldn't be happy, until the adults could figure out when and where they could express that joy, was everything you have to come know about the industry in 2025. Oh, and the game itself was pretty good, too.
The stage-specific slapstick was the ideal ending to the best and weirdest football game of the college season. Except that, this being Ole Miss and all, it didn't end even after it ended, because they don't know when it was all supposed to end. By beating Georgia 39-34 in a game that lurched between brilliance, zaniness, and miscellaneous stuff you never saw before, Mississippi won the chance to keep playing in January when they have normally struggled to reach the end of November. In doing so, the program reset its collision course with peripatetic imp Lane Kiffin, the coach who won't go away.
Four Ole Miss assistants and two other staffers, including offensive coordinator Charlie Weis The Younger, have signed on to join Kiffin, the former Mississippi coach, on his new staff at LSU. But with the transfer portal opening today, allowing for the legal trafficking of any football player worth the bother, there is now a serious question about whether those coaches will have to leave their current team before its championship semifinal game to join their other current team in trying to seize players on the open market. Among those players would presumably be some of the players that Kiffin's once and future assistants are currently coaching in the College Football Playoff.
You couldn't make this up because you would never have thought of it. And yet here we are, in a sport with no rules, and also no enforcement of the suggestions they pass off as rules, in which the one feel-good story to emerge from four mostly terrible games has turned into what the French call "un spectacle du merde."
Don't get us wrong here: We're all for it. The more embarrassing, chaotic, duplicitous, and potentially litigious, the better. Kiffin as an agent of chaos may be old news, but there is always a new twist that keeps him fresh and creative when the rest of the industry is falling back on classic tropes like "the coach of today's bowl game already has another job across the country." It comes as quite literally zero surprise that, according to ESPN's Mark Schlabach, "Kiffin considered attending the Sugar Bowl, and lobbied to appear on College GameDay or another program during the ESPN game broadcast (but) ended up skipping the Sugar Bowl to attend LSU's women's basketball game Thursday night." Even he can't give it up after, well, giving it up.
If you are tired of talking about Lane Kiffin, you are certainly well within your rights, but you'd be missing the point of the entire exercise, which is to see how long and how far adults can run with their pants around their ankles. Consider that the other three quarterfinal games—Miami-Ohio State, Oregon-Texas Tech, and Alabama-Indiana—were all megaturgid hyperbores with an aggregate score of 85-17. By comparison, Ole Miss-Georgia was a frenetic masterwork between two coaches who emptied their playbooks in an escalating exchange of desperate countermoves and two quarterbacks doing ridiculously Mahomesian things to keep drives alive. It ended not with a winning field goal by Mississippi's Lucas Carneiro but with the added bonus of the old safety-on-the-kickoff play that made Ole Miss' three-point win into a five-point win and made the final second last 10 minutes, because there's over, and then there's o-ver.
And why is this circus of nonsense such a grand thing for everyone involved? Because it didn't involve any committees, television network executives, sponsorship blowhards, or Pat McAfee. It was a game good enough to banish the shameless man who jumped effortlessly from wanting to steal the limelight from the team he once coached to holding hands with women's basketball coach Kim Mulkey as she entered the floor at Baton Rouge for last night's Kentucky-LSU game to the sideshow status he deserves. (As fans of theatrical omens might have guessed, Kiffin's cameo ended with LSU losing its first game of the season on a last-second three-pointer.)
If all this seems confusing to you, well, that just means you haven't watched Blazing Saddles enough times. For those of you who have, we are at the studio cafeteria pie fight stage, while Kiffin is Cleavon Little slapping palms with Count Basie on his way out of town. This—all those exchanges and distractions, all these false endings—is in many ways the perfect ending to a college football season that spat in the eye of structure, tradition, and the dignified amassing of talent and money and replaced it with a psychotic free-for-all chasing even more of the same.
Lane Kiffin isn't necessarily the reason for the season, but like any strategically inclined rogue, he saw his moment and pounced, just as Trinidad Chambliss saw his own moments last night. It was a game for the decade with an ending for the millennium, and the conflict surrounding the Rebels' coordinators means that it also carries with it a next-morning hangover for the ages. Today, and for the next few days, Oxford, Miss. is the center of the college football universe, and if you don't have a sense of humor sufficiently attuned to that fact, well, maybe lawn bowling is your game. The rest of us can only dread the moment when the suits reconvene after the season ends to "fix" the system that gave us this.
