Ole Miss head football coach Lane Kiffin has never pretended to be a coach in the mold of previous generations: a folksy, starch-collared paternal figure talking disingenuously about character and morals and how they shaped the foundation of his football program. Plus, to be honest, being like Joe Paterno seemed really boring.
No, for better or for worse, Kiffin has long embraced his reputation as an irreverent frat-bro troll. The jester’s act has made him a favorite of the Barstool Sports and OutKick universe and has managed to keep him and his teams in the public eye. One wonders what we’d say about him and his middling career if not for the existence of X, the social media platform once known as Twitter. In fact, trolling might be what Kiffin is known for as much as anything he’s done in 15 years as a head coach—a couple of pre-COVID-era Conference USA championships notwithstanding.
And while his whimsical approach is sometimes a welcome departure from the norm, I think Kiffin’s most recent attempt at amusing his nearly 720,000 followers on X crossed a line. And I hope enough of the nation’s top college football recruits and their families are paying attention. I’m talking to the Black ones in particular.
Last week, in response to a post from a follower complimenting him for not referring to the Gulf of Mexico as an ocean, Kiffin responded by calling it the “Gulf of America,” the preferred term of President Donald Trump. He included Trump’s X handle in the post and added an American flag emoji, a not-so-subtle endorsement of the president’s ridiculous crusade to rename the gulf as an insult to Mexico.
Kiffin’s post wasn’t an explicit endorsement of Trump or all of his policies, but Trump’s supporters certainly seemed to take it that way, which is why I’m comfortable thinking of it as such. And if Kiffin isn’t willing to explain the thinking behind his post, or take it down, then I think Black recruits and transfers should think about going somewhere else.
While the University of Mississippi has made efforts in recent times to improve, it has long struggled with issues around race.
After the Rebels—a nickname steeped in Confederate iconography that was adopted during the state’s racist backlash of the 1930s—claimed six SEC championships from 1947 to 1963, their dominant run came to an end with the retirement of legendary head coach Johnny Vaught and the gradual desegregation of colleges across the South.
Without great football to watch on the field, it became harder to miss the array of Confederate battle flags dotting the stands at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. There was also the Colonel Reb mascot, a white-haired old man many thought resembled a plantation owner. And the school’s theme song was “Dixie.”
And as border state rivals—Alabama, LSU, Tennessee, and even Arkansas—thrived and won national and conference championships, the Rebels struggled to reach the heights of their Jim Crow–era heyday.
In 1983, the football program’s former recruiting coordinator sounded the alarm about how all the Confederate paraphernalia and the crowd it attracted were hurting Ole Miss on the recruiting trail. “No question the symbols were our No. 1 problem,” Tommy Limbaugh told The Washington Post at the time. “We had circumstances where the Ku Klux Klan was marching in Oxford and pictures were being taken and circulated. Then the blacks would come and see the flag being waved in the stands.”
If you were a Black high school football star from New Orleans, Atlanta, or Miami, it was difficult to see yourself fitting into an atmosphere that seemed so aroused by slavery-era imagery. In fact, it even hurt Ole Miss in trying to land maybe the most highly touted recruit to ever come from the state.
Marcus Dupree was a blue-chip running back from Philadelphia, Mississippi, only two hours south of campus. But when his recruiting reached a fever pitch in the winter of 1982, Ole Miss wasn’t among the four finalists. Dupree narrowed his choices to Texas, UCLA, Southern Mississippi, and Oklahoma, where he ultimately decided to go. Years later, Dupree told the Post that Ole Miss “wasn’t the type of school I was looking for. It just wasn’t the environment that I was interested in.”
And if you listen to players who’ve been there more recently, the environment seemingly hasn’t changed all that much. In the football podcast Raw Room, former NFL and Auburn offensive lineman King Dunlap said, “Playing at Ole Miss is one of the most racist places to play.” That set off former Ole Miss running back Brandon Bolden, who listed off a series of racist incidents on campus, including a group of Ku Klux Klansmen showing up ahead of a LSU game. Bolden said that experience inspired him to become more aware of his surroundings. “Little did we know, there’s a Confederate flag flying in the middle of campus,” he said. “I always assumed it was the American flag.”
Given that history, it’s interesting Kiffin was so willing to play this kind of cutesy social media game with a polarizing political figure like Trump.
It goes without saying that Trump is largely popular in Mississippi, if we’re considering his landslide win in the general election there. But college football at the level Ole Miss aspires to play depends heavily on the contributions of Black people, and they overwhelmingly don’t support Trump or his politics, even if he made marginal gains among that base in November.
For years now, I have advocated for Black athletes in this country to use their fledgling and fleeting power when and where appropriate. Even before it was legal, white power brokers and college boosters fought for their attention with money and cars and other once-impermissible “benefits.” Black athletes are among the few classes of people who can compel bigwigs across the South to consider significant changes to their culture and institutions—simply because of concern about those athletes choosing to go elsewhere.
In 2001, then–South Carolina head coach Lou Holtz called for political leaders to take down the Confederate flag from the state capitol. “We need not to take a segment of our society and treat them with disrespect, and that is the way our Black players feel about the Confederate flag,” said Holtz, who notably supported the reelection of the segregationist U.S. senator Jesse Helms in 1983 and has campaigned for Trump in recent years. Holtz’s successor, Steve Spurrier, took up that call, and eventually the flag was removed in 2015 after a racist mass murder at a Black Charleston church.
In 2015, then-Oklahoma head coach Bob Stoops attended a protest after a video was posted online showing members of a fraternity making racist chants, including one about lynching. “It’s sad the ignorance that can still be there with some people,” Stoops told Tulsa World. “It’s just appalling.” The fraternity was ultimately pressured into shutting down its campus chapter.
Even the likes of Senator Tommy Tuberville, a Trump-backed Republican from Alabama, pushed Ole Miss to ban the Confederate flag from home games when he was the head coach there. “I was hired to win football games,” he told The Washington Post in 1997. “And other schools are using the Rebel flag against us in recruiting Black athletes.”
Politics and the pressure to win can often make for strange bedfellows in football, even if the changes aren’t long-lasting and if the alliance isn’t ultimately durable.
Simply, coaches and political leaders are willing to listen to Black players in ways that they are not willing to listen to others, including activists and politicians. Even if there are no substantive changes, the institutions will at least pretend to consider their point of view to give the appearance of open-mindedness.
And over the years, Black players who have pursued activism have sometimes produced major results. I covered the Missouri football team in 2015, when they joined a school protest against racist incidents on campus and ultimately pushed the school’s president to resign. Decades of lobbying and legal maneuvering ultimately led to groundbreaking reforms in college sports, including the approval of name, image, and likeness rights.
Look, by no means am I asserting that Lane Kiffin’s mildly trolly post about the “Gulf of America” constitutes a civil rights offense. But in a time when the Trump administration has launched a full-on attack on higher education, much of it targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that support Black students on campuses across the country, Kiffin owes a clarification of his message to his players and any others who might want to play for him someday.
And if Kiffin won’t or can’t answer what he meant by that post, then it’s up to the players—and pretty much only them—to make him do it. They’re the only ones he’ll ultimately listen to.
