It is mid-May. The season is four months away. Lane Kiffin has already given an interview to Vanity Fair — Vanity Fair — taking shots at Ole Miss. Not Sports Illustrated. Not The Athletic. Vanity Fair. The man left Oxford after an 11-1 regular season and the program's first-ever College Football Playoff appearance, bolted to Baton Rouge before the bowl confetti hit the floor, and is now doing glossy magazine press runs while LSU and Texas each spent somewhere in the neighborhood of forty million dollars building their rosters. This is the sport we chose.
At least ESPN had the good sense to reward the chaos. College GameDay announced it will open its 40th season — and its milestone 500th episode — at Tiger Stadium on September 5th, when Kiffin debuts against a Clemson program that went 7-6 last year for the first time since 2010. So the circus gets a tent, Dabo Swinney gets a redemption arc setup, and the rest of us get to watch LSU fans spend the summer renting live tigers and arguing about who the Celebrity Guest Picker should be. Already a five-alarm event, Week 3 sets up Kiffin's return to Oxford, which will be covered with the intensity usually reserved for actual international incidents. Ole Miss fans are coping by pointing out that Kiffin left; LSU fans are coping by spending forty million dollars. Everyone is coping in their own way.
Meanwhile, Greg Sankey is out here playing the role of the guy at the party who won't let anyone have fun. The ACC formally joined the Big Ten's push for a 24-team playoff this week, and Sankey responded by standing at a podium in Birmingham and saying, essentially, that everyone needs to calm down and do more research. His own coaches — Heupel, Smart, Drinkwitz, new Kentucky guy Will Stein who has coached exactly zero SEC games — are publicly lining up for 24 teams. Sankey's position is 16. The actual reason nobody discusses out loud: the SEC title game generates over eighty million dollars a year, and a bloated 24-team bracket threatens to make it meaningless. So the next time someone tells you this is a philosophical debate about "the sanctity of the regular season," know that it is an eighty-million-dollar philosophical debate. The AFCA meanwhile proposed eliminating conference championship games entirely, which Sankey dismissed by noting they never called him first. The AFCA did not call him. This is where we are.
And just to complete the comedy: oddsmakers have opened LSU at -190 to miss the College Football Playoff in Kiffin's first year. Forty million dollars. GameDay's 500th episode. Vanity Fair profile. Favored to miss the bracket. Baton Rouge is gonna be fine.
