Tag Archives: Lane Kiffin

Processing Loss

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Let me just say this. My next stop, you know where Lake Burton is, in north Georgia, right on the North Carolina border, Rabun County, it’s a lake, where they made Deliverance, if you ever saw the movie. That’s where I go in the summertime. That’s where I like it. That’s my next stop.
– Coach Nick Saban, Introductory Press Conference at The University of Alabama, January 4, 2007

Collette Connell went national when on January 3, 2007, she kissed newly-announced Alabama head coach Nick Saban on his arrival at the Tuscaloosa airport. She went for the mouth, but he made his name as a defensive coach and he was quick. She only got cheek. Unfortunately for Collette, the cops were quick too. They got her for a DUI later that day. Her smiling mugshot went national as well.

Before getting pulled over, she hopped around in front of a Fox 6 camera. “We ballin’! We ballin’!” she hollered. Ineloquent – sloppy really – but she spoke for a lot of people.

I think you have to live here for a while to understand how Alabamians feel about college football. Before he went national, Paul Finebaum was a local reporter and later radio personality in Birmingham. I remember listening to his show years ago during March Madness. It was down to a few teams, maybe the Elite Eight, and Paul had taken a few calls about Duke or whoever was expected to win it all. The next caller up started full of vinegar with, “I thought this was supposed to be a sports show, Paul! All this basketball and tournament nonsense and you ain’t said nothing about football. Spring practice started today!” He wasn’t being sarcastic. He meant it. I was nodding along as I drove, but I’ve had early summer arguments about who should be the backup free safety so what he said made sense to me.

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Thanks, Jimbo. Money’s on the Nightstand.

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

After the disappointing Sumlin administration, Texas A&M decided it so loved Jimbo Fisher they paid Florida State $7 million to disentangle him from that university so they could entangle him with a ten-year contract worth $75 million of their own. After holding par for two years with the 8-5 – plus or minus one – rut A&M nurtured into a comfortable groove, Fisher led the Aggies to a remarkable 9-1 2020 record in the all-SEC schedule gauntlet COVID year. The powers that be decided they loved Jimbo $1.5 million a year more that day than yesterday. A Gene Stallings-less (I maintain he would have known better) Board of Regents upped the contract to ninety-five point six million dollars effective January I, 2022.

It didn’t work out. Winning became a problem, but under Fisher A&M was able to assemble talent. So much so that Lane Kiffin, college football’s equivalent of the intellectual dark web, pointed out how great recruiting classes were at A&M while making sure to hint that Fisher’s done less with more and, in this age when buying players is a-okay as long as you have a plausible money laundering Name, Image, and Likeness story handy, that it was cash and not the coach that brought the five stars to College Station.

“I don’t know how you collect much better. So, congratulations to their group that collected these guys,” Kiffin said at a press conference the Monday before playing Fisher and A&M. Kiffin is good at twisting knives. Blake Toppmeyer wrote in USA Today last week, “Just when I thought Kiffin might be finished dunking on Fisher, he hung on the rim.” After the “collected” comment, someone asked the Ole Miss coach if the team or fans might rally around a coach having a rough time of it.

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The Empire Strikes Back and Kiffin Blows the College Football World Apart

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Nick Saban said that Texas A&M paid players to sign with their football team and A&M coach Jimbo Fisher went ballistic. Fisher did nothing wrong as far as the letter, but he ran the spirit off like Bill Murray with an electron proton pack. Fisher freaked the hell out and held a press conference blaming Saban for everything from the Hindenburg disaster to New Coke and told the world that he was done with the Alabama coach and that many coaches who worked with him never would again.

The last time the two worked together was during the 2004 season and Fisher was so apparently disgusted by the “despicable” “narcissist” Saban who he strongly implied is a cheater, that he was done with the man except when in 2018 he talked to reporters outside the Alabama locker room praising his former head coach while waiting to congratulate Nick on a National Championship. Fish deal with waves and Fisher’s disgust seems to crest and through.

I’ve got a piece on this over at ordinary-times.com and spoke about it with editor Andrew Donaldson (@four4thefire) on his podcast Heard Tell (@HeardTellShow.) I linked to the parts that are specific to this post but the whole is worth your time.

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