LSU head coach Lane Kiffin recently landed himself in some hot water over some things he said in an interview with Vanity Fair. Now, he's walking them back and apologizing. This comes after the coach drew considerable controversy for comments he made while serving as Ole Miss head coach, in which he said he encountered difficulty recruiting black players in Mississippi. That difficulty, as Kiffin put it, arose from parents' concerns about the state's racial history.
Simply put, based on the reaction it drew, Kiffin didn't communicate his thoughts the way he thought he did.
“I really apologize if anybody at Ole Miss or in Mississippi was offended by that,” Kiffin said to On3 after the fallout. “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.
“I was asked questions about the differences in recruiting, and I said a narrative that we battled there from some out-of-state black parents and grandparents was not wanting their kid to move to Mississippi. That’s a narrative that coaches have been fighting forever. It wasn’t calculated by bringing it up.”
Lane Kiffin's comments to Vanity Fair draw controversy and criticism
So, what exactly did Kiffin say that got him into this mess? It came up when Kiffin was answering one of the dozens of questions in the interview with Chris Smith of Vanity Fair. He recalled some of the issues he had in recruiting because of the stigma around Oxford that some black players have due to the state's muddled history.
Kiffin claims to have lost out on players because of that in itself. He views LSU and Baton Rouge as places that aren't affected the same way. He took it even further by saying that it "feels like there's no segregation" in the area.
“‘Hey, coach, we really like you. But my grandparents aren’t letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi,’” Kiffin had said in the interview with 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.’”
While this does not look the best on paper, Kiffin is self-aware. To the point that he actually called Vanity Fair to make sure it was clarified that he was trying to make statements, not present any type of opinion that was meant to be inflammatory, or to try to take a jab at the Rebels.
"I just hope (what I said) comes across as respectful to Ole Miss," Kiffin said. "There are some things that I'm saying that are factual; they're not shots."
To provide context, Ole Miss has taken steps in recent years to distance itself from its ties to the former Confederacy. That includes the removal of the Colonel Reb mascot and later banning confederate flags in the stands back in 1997, which used to be very popular.
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