It’s easy to pile on former Ole Miss head ball coach and now current LSU head ball coach, Lane Kiffin, but this fifty-year-old man has a way of oozing douchiness.

There is no other way to describe the face, the posture, the clothes, the trademark visor that on any man of a certain age raises the douche-o-meter, the public relations-inspired bon mots that clatter off his tongue that make any thinking college football fan do a double-take at the source of said comments, his need for prayer to make a decision that had already been made, and Lane Kiffin’s innate ability to conjure the image of Caddyshack’s Spaulding Smails whenever I think of his douchey presence on the old gridiron.

“Fifty bucks says the Smails kid picks his nose.” – Porterhouse

Lane Kiffin is not alone in college football. The sport is decorated with glad-handers and gamblers, nepo coaches and Neanderthals, savvy agents and college presidents lacking savoir faire, millionaire money-grubbing coaches and greedy parents pimping out their sons to the highest bidder. The game is a flim-flam scam and fans fund these slight-of-hand schemes that make coaches, agents, athletic directors, athletic conferences, television networks and now some teenage players a vast amount of money.

College football is rudderless. Whatever rules exist are made to be broken. Million dollar mega lawsuits are as much a part of the game as is hiring a graduate assistant coach at a barely able to survive salary. As much as society attempts to push college football into the future, the sport resolutely and fiercely clings to its past.

Pay players. Create a transfer portal that favors the players. And the immediate reaction from the administrators and coaches that govern the sport is: This is a completely lopsided relationship. Coaches can no longer bury a kid on the depth chart, because another program is going to give that kid an opportunity. A volatile system of supply and demand is now a real concept in college football.

A college football head coach can no longer act like Steve Spurrier and play golf every day. Just ask former Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze how his short game is.

The stakes are higher. The demand for wins are higher. And the money to be made is in the stratosphere, which creates more problems.

College football is now a sport where a team on the brink of a possible national championship-run and ranked 6th in the nation, Ole Miss, is losing its coach to a conference rival, LSU. The season isn’t over, the College Football Playoff has yet to begin and Ole Miss is hiring its defensive coordinator, Pete Golding, as Lane Kiffin’s permanent replacement. Golding will have to stave off attempts by Kiffin to immediately abscond with other Ole Miss assistant coaches to Baton Rouge. Golding will have to re-recruit his Ole Miss players to stay at Oxford and not take the Kiffin cash in Baton Rouge.

Ole Miss players, alums and fans have waited generations for something like this to happen and the reality on the ground is that Ole Miss’s national championship aspirations have been cut off at the knees. How does this happen?

How does Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), with ten conferences and 136 schools, have no rules in place to prevent a circumstance such as this from happening? The majority of players are now given one transfer portal a year, that runs from January 2nd thru January 16th, to decide whether to stay or go.

Coaches are bound by nothing. If Louisiana’s governor, LSU’s new school president and new athletic director show up to Casa Kiffin with a $91 million-dollar contract for seven years, which they did; that’s going to buy a lot of purple and gold visors (Lane Kiffin ain’t paying for a visor.) and the Kiffin family is hopping on a private jet to Baton Rouge — only days after a victory in the Egg Bowl — to be anointed the saviors of LSU football.

Kiffin will now be the second-highest paid head coach in college football with an annual salary of $13 million dollars. Only Georgia head coach Kirby Smart is above Kiffin on the coaching salary pedestal.

The Bama Boys: Kirby & Lane

The Kiffin Buyout:

If LSU fires Kiffin without cause, it would owe him 80% of his remaining salary, which would be paid out in monthly installments through 2032. The deal does not include any mitigation or offset clauses that would reduce the cost if Kiffin got another job, fully guaranteeing his compensation. LSU would not have to pay him if he was fired for cause. – From nola.com

The good old boys at LSU sure don’t care about handing away another large chunk of change if Kiffin fails with the Tigers. Fifty million to Brian Kelly apparently didn’t make anyone blink. And then in a few years — it could be two years with the crazy nature of college football — LSU might be on the hook for another monster buyout to Kiffin.

The money is absolutely astonishing and the terms of the buyout packages — favoring Kelly and Kiffin — are similar to what Putin is looking to leverage from Ukraine. Kiffin’s agent, Jimmy Sexton, should give a tutorial to Putin.

What’s even more astonishing is that LSU appears to routinely move the douche-o-meter with its most recent head football coach hirings:

— Ed Orgeron

— Brian Kelly

— Lane Kiffin

That’s hard to compete against.

Right now, Lane Kiffin is the face of college football. Let’s just say that isn’t necessarily a good thing for the sport, but no one seems to care or has the power to rein in a cluster fuck of a sport.

College football is inhabited with a cavalcade of Spaulding Smails wannabes.

Lane “Spaulding Smails” Kiffin