At the moment of this writing, Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin has reportedly informed his athletic director that he has accepted LSU’s bag and intends to coach in Baton Rouge next season. This is potentially fantastic news – for the Group of Six.

For nearly a decade now, when a Group of Six head coach departs for Power 4 gold, it marks the destruction of his former program. The top assistants follow. The star players are poached. The recruiting class evaporates, immediately putting the program behind the eight ball. Meanwhile, the media celebrates the masterstroke delivered by the Power Four program whose advantage is an artificial construct created by broadcast and corporate entities. Not a single voice is raised for the small market program that has been decimated beyond recognition. Nobody cares.

Except now some of you are going to care. Some of you are going to care real bad. Because now your beloved Ole Miss, your Hotty Toddy, your Colonel Reb, your Party in the Grove is about to take it right on the kisser. Your four and five star recruiting? Poof! You’re star players? Tigers now! Your talented assistants and recruiters? Wearing purple and yellow! How do you like it?

Suprise, muthafucka! I already know how you’re gonna like it. It’s blows, brother! You flew too close to the sun, Ole Miss Fans, and now your spiraling in the cold hard dirt of the Mississippi Delta. You got plenty of shoulders to cry on, though. We citizens of the G6 have been there year after year after year. We have all kinds of coping mechanisms to share.

But maybe it will be different. Because now it’s happening to a member of the SEC! Suddenly, it will dawn on some ESPN goober like Rece Davis or Kirk Herbstreit that this ridiculous money-driven system of college sports is a complete and utter train wreck – a vehicle of destruction that has the capacity of crippling any program, even one as monied and storied as Ole Miss. Perhaps the pretentious auteurs of ESPN Films will produce a documentary about mean old Lane Kiffin and his selfish betrayal of innocent Ole Miss fans. Maybe somebody in power will finally give a damn.

Because that’s the only way this dumbass system we’ve concocted is ever to be broken is by hurting the very programs it was supposed to project. When Ole Miss finds itself mired in mediocrity next year, perhaps somebody with money and influence will finally say, “unlimited transfer and NIL has ruined what used to be something special.” Sorry it had to be you, Ole Miss, to be sacrificed on the Alter of Reason. Maybe you’ll pull yourself up by your bootstraps and be elite again someday.

IMAGE: AI monstrosity