It is May 14th, it is 90 degrees everywhere in the SEC footprint, and Lane Kiffin has already found a way to make Oxford, Mississippi, even angrier at him than it was in December.

In case you missed it — and you didn't, because college football Twitter does not sleep — Kiffin sat down for a four-hour profile with Vanity Fair and casually dropped that one reason he left Ole Miss for LSU is that Black recruits' grandparents "weren't letting" them move to Oxford. He noted the contrast with Baton Rouge, adding that parents visiting LSU's campus told him, "It feels like there's no segregation." He then followed that up the next day with an apology to On3, saying, "It wasn't calculated by bringing it up."

Buddy. Four hours. You had four hours to not say this specific thing.

To be clear, the recruiting friction Kiffin described is real and documented — Ole Miss has been wrestling with Confederate-era imagery since Tommy Tuberville was literally telling the chancellor in 1996 that the flags on campus were "killing" recruiting. None of this is new. But there is something uniquely Kiffin about leaving a program mid-playoff run, signing a $91 million deal in Baton Rouge, and then giving a magazine profile that doubles as a dissertation on why your old school is the problem. Ole Miss is now being led by Pete Golding, who took those supposedly unrecruitable Rebels to the CFP semifinals before losing to Miami, which: ouch, Lane.

The September 19 trip to Vaught-Hemingway Stadium was already going to be unhinged. Kiffin should probably bring a helmet for the parking lot.

Meanwhile, in an act of pure self-parody, the media has now spent the better part of a week debating whether Kiffin's LSU — the team that spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 million assembling its roster and poached Sam Leavitt, Jordan Seaton, and basically the entire Pac-12 alumni association through the portal — will go UNDER 8.5 wins. Saturday Down South published a whole piece on this today. The arguments are not insane: brutal schedule, 60 roster newcomers, a mobile quarterback with injury questions. But Lane Kiffin is publicly campaigning against the word "expectations" while his AD handed him a $13 million-a-year salary. We are all just supposed to relax.

And then there's Greg Sankey, who rolled back into Birmingham this week to reiterate, for approximately the fourteenth time this offseason, that he wants a 16-team CFP and not a 24-team one. The Big Ten wants 24. The ACC wants 24. Kirby Smart, Josh Heupel, and Eli Drinkwitz want 24. The SEC itself is 5-8 in CFP games the last two seasons. And yet here is Greg Sankey, standing in the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame, talking about "tipping points" and "research" while the Big Ten has won three straight national titles. The SEC commissioner is blocking playoff expansion the way Auburn blocks a field goal attempt: at exactly the wrong moment, for reasons only they fully understand.

Happy Thursday. The season is still 114 days away. God help us all.