{"id":651540,"date":"2026-05-19T02:51:47","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T02:51:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/651540\/"},"modified":"2026-05-19T02:51:47","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T02:51:47","slug":"paul-finebaum-lane-kiffin-knew-what-he-was-doing-with-vanity-fair-article-shot-at-ole-miss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/651540\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Finebaum: Lane Kiffin ‘knew what he was doing’ with Vanity Fair article, shot at Ole Miss"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Finebaum isn\u2019t surprised by anything done by Lane Kiffin these days, even his eyebrow-raising comments in a recent Vanity Fair article.<\/a> Kiffin, referring to Ole Miss\u2019 history with racism and race-related issues in terms of recruiting modern-day players, was just the latest jab at his old stomping grounds, per Finebaum.<\/p>\n

Kiffin did issue an apology for the comments because he didn\u2019t mean them as the end-all, be-all negative. But even with a four-hour interview and an in-depth piece, Finebaum claimed he knew Kiffin was smarter than that.<\/p>\n

\u201cWasn\u2019t outraged, because I feel like I know Lane Kiffin well enough to know that he is simply just behind the curtain, pulling the strings like he always does, he\u2019s the Wizard of Oz,\u201d Finebaum said on McElroy and Cubelic.<\/a> \u201cHe knew what he was doing. Now I say that, adding that very few people know what they\u2019re doing in a four-hour interview, you\u2019re likely to say anything. I just think he saw the opportunity to take one more swing with his baseball bat at the pi\u00f1ata, which is Ole Miss, and he hit it square across the top with his Louisville Slugger.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think in the very end it\u2019s going to matter a whole lot. A lot of people\u2019s feelings were hurt, and he ended up talking about things which have really no relevance in today\u2019s college football world about what happened in the past. It\u2019s relevant, it\u2019s important, it ought to be discussed. But in the context of college football, we got off track last week, and Lane Kiffin, I\u2019m sure, ended the week laughing, because that\u2019s how he is, and that\u2019s who he is. He\u2019s still a really good coach, and I think the pressure is going to be intensified around him and on him, but I\u2019m not saying that he has to do anything in his first year. He\u2019s got universal support from everyone in that state and everyone at that university.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finebaum said it\u2019s fascinating to see Kiffin go about in this way, even at this point in his career, especially with the expectations at LSU<\/a>. For how good a coach as he is, the facade is still there.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, I think you\u2019re right, and the one thing that we forget sometimes when we\u2019re classifying him as either a villain or a clown or a puppeteer is that he\u2019s a superb football coach,\u201d Finebaum said. \u201cAnd you know this because you\u2019ve done a lot of his games, but he cringes when people attack and criticize his philosophy and his strategy and his game selection, because I\u2019ve been at the other end of that, and I know you have, because he really feels like he knows what he\u2019s doing. And I think that\u2019s the hardest part for people to understand that beneath all of this, this facade is one of the best football coaches in the country.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Paul Finebaum isn\u2019t surprised by anything done by Lane Kiffin these days, even his eyebrow-raising comments in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":651541,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[399,96466,398,396,397,99],"class_list":["post-651540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-football","tag-lane-kiffin-94-jefferson","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaafootball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=651540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/651541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=651540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=651540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=651540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}