Rick Cleveland, the dean of Mississippi sports writers who now practices his trade writing for Mississippi Today, asked the right question the day after Lane Kiffin’s Ole Miss football team lost to in-state rival Mississippi State.
Is Kiffin worth $9 million a year?
That’s reportedly what Ole Miss offered its coach to keep him from bolting to Auburn, which then opted for a previous Rebel coach, Hugh Freeze. Freeze left Oxford in disgrace five years ago but has been doing his penance, and winning games, at Liberty University in the meantime.
We don’t know that any college coach is worth $9 million, other than perhaps Alabama’s Nick Saban. But Kiffin’s record this year would be more likely to justify a pay cut than what is being reported as a nearly $2 million raise.
The Rebels won eight games this year, but seven of those victories came during a soft opening schedule that included five teams that finished the season with a losing record. Ole Miss lost four out of its last five games, including last week’s Egg Bowl, in which Kiffin wasted two crucial timeouts in the final two minutes before the Rebels tried unsuccessfully to tie the game with a two-point conversion.
Early in the year, when Ole Miss was winning its first seven games and rising to a No. 7 national ranking, Kiffin was being called a master of the new quasi-professional landscape in college football, which allows a team to quickly rebuild through transfers and the lure of lucrative endorsement deals. Four losses later, the praise looks premature and the early-season ranking unjustified.
Kiffin himself may have contributed to his team’s late-season swoon. The intrigue over the Auburn job was a significant distraction for him, and most likely for his players as well. That’s because they, as with most of the Rebel faithful, expected Kiffin to jump ship, since loyalty to a school or a team has never been a part of his coaching style.
Kiffin is a hired hand, like several of the transfers he’s been recruiting. The only way to keep a hired hand is to keep paying him more than the next desperate employer is willing to.
Ole Miss opted to up the ante this time, even if it meant paying Kiffin — a good but not great head coach — above his station. As Rick Cleveland predicts, the school and its boosters will most likely face the same situation next season. There will be another down-and-out program — there always is one — competing for Kiffin’s services, and Ole Miss will have to decide whether to pony up again.
