Decisions, decisions, Part Deux

 The shoe finally dropped yesterday in Oxford, Miss., and, well, it went almost exactly the way everyone expected it would.

To wit:

1. Ole Miss football coach Lane Kiffin took the money and ran to LSU.

2. And, being Lane Kiffin, he was a total douchecanoe about it.

What he did was tell his staff if they wanted to follow him to LSU, they'd best be on the plane to Baton Rouge or he'd leave them behind. This was an attempt to carry out his rumored threat that if he wasn't allowed to coach the Rebels in the College Football Playoff, he'd take his entire staff with him and leave the team and community he professed to love high and dry.

Then he released an official statement that was a masterwork of obfuscation, blaming Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter for not allowing him to stick around for the CFP. And making it sound like he, Lane Kiffin, was the hero in the whole deal for standing by his players.

"My request ... was denied by Keith Carter despite the team also asking him to allow me to keep coaching them so they could better maintain their high level of performance," the statement read.

In other words: I WANTED to stand by my guys for another minute or two, but the AD wouldn't let me. 

In further other words: Therefore I am throwing him under the bus, driving over him, then backing up to do it again. Even though he revived my faltering career by hiring me when a lot of others wouldn't.

There are words to describe such breathtaking ingratitude, but most I can't repeat here. This is a PG-13 Blob, after all.

Suffice it to say it was nuclear level self-absorption for Kiffin to think Ole Miss would allow him to coach the Rebels in the CFP after he'd already told them he was abandoning them. And not just abandoning them, but abandoning them for a conference rival.

(Somewhere in suburbia. A typical middle class neighorhood.)

Suburban Dad: "Honey, I'm home! And guess what? I'm leaving you for the 25-year-old stripper who lives next door!"

Suburban Mom: "Pack your bags and get out then, mister."

Dad: "Aw, come on. Don't be that way. Think about Junior. Can I still take him on our big fishing trip this weekend? The kid is really looking forward to it, and I'd like to be there for him one last time before I ditch his ass."

Mom: "What?? NO."

Dad: "Well, OK. But he'll be really disappointed when I tell him you wouldn't let him go."

Which of course makes Mom the bad guy.

Which of course means she has to patch things up with her son while Dad hits the bricks with Trudi Kazootie.

Which of course is precisely what Kiffin is doing to Ole Miss.

And, look, it's not as if we didn't know already that loyalty is as obsolete as the rotary phone in the age of NIL and ungoverned transfer portal. But somehow when people wring their hands over the perceived crumbling of college athletics, it's always the athletes who get tagged as faithless carpetbaggers. Yet all they're doing is exactly what Coach Slobberknocker has been doing for decades.

Jumping schools for a chunkier payday, or more exposure, or a better situation. Being a me-first guy even as he preaches teamwork and family and all-for-one, one-for-all. Being the rankest of hypocrites when he bemoans how the kids are just in it for themselves these days.  

I never want to hear that again from anyone. 

Especially if "anyone" is named Lane Kiffin.