Ole Miss HC Lane Kiffin admits social media troll account was created by team staffer
The weirdest story to come out of Ole Miss' 38-25 win over Penn State in the Peach Bowl on Saturday was head coach Lane Kiffin confirming that an online troll account was in fact created by one of his staffers. Not only that, he also thought the whole thing was pretty funny.
In the lead-up to Saturday's game Kiffin had been sharing Tweets from an X user named @Weare_Pennst123 that was posting fake quotes from Penn State players.
It was clearly a troll account looking to gain attention, but Internet sleuths began speculating that the account belonged to Ole Miss student assist Fisher Ray.
It turned out they were correct.
Following the win, Kiffin confirmed that the account belonged to Ray and that he loved it.
"I thought it was pretty funny actually because they discovered that it was Fisher Ray, one of our assistants, one of our student assistants," Kiffin said. "So Fisher is now kind of famous. But I thought it was really cool last night when he showed it to me, he's like, these Penn State fans now, they're into this. They researched his password and e-mail and were able to figure out which guy it was that started it. It was all in good fun. I hope the fans had fun with it."
Kiffin went on to say he was not going to start policing people's social media accounts within the program.
It is the type of thing that Kiffin and his staff — and Ole Miss fans — can laugh about after the fact because his team won in pretty convincing fashion.
It probably would not have been as well received — by Kiffin, the program or fans — had they lost the game. Fortunately for them they do not need to worry about that hypothetical.
Saturday's win was an historic one for the Ole Miss program as it gave the team its first 11-win season in school history.
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