Lane Kiffin apologizes for his controversial comments about Ole Miss

Lane Kiffin tried to backtrack on some controversial comments he made about recruiting at Ole Miss.

In a recent Vanity Fair interview, Kiffin told reporter Chris Smith that he had struggled at times to recruit at Ole Miss because of the school’s association with Confederate symbolism. He even indicated it was one of the reasons he left for LSU, a school that does not carry the same sort of stigma.

“‘Hey, coach, we really like you. But my grandparents aren’t letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi,’ Kiffin relayed as a message he heard from some recruits. “That doesn’t come up when you say Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Parents were sitting here this weekend saying the campus’s diversity feels so great: ‘It feels like there’s no segregation. And we want that for our kid because that’s the real world.'”

Kiffin seemed aware the comment would provoke controversy, telling the magazine that it was simply a factual statement and that he hoped he came across as “respectful to Ole Miss.” That was not enough to head off the outcry, and he issued a fuller apology on Tuesday.

“I really apologize if anybody at Ole Miss or in Mississippi was offended by that,” Kiffin told Wilson Alexander of On3. “I was asked questions about the differences in recruiting, and I said a narrative that we battled there from some out-of-state Black parents and grandparents was not wanting their kid to move to Mississippi. That’s a narrative that coaches have been fighting forever. It wasn’t calculated by bringing it up.”