It is the middle of May. There are no games. Coaches are supposed to be on the golf course or pretending to watch film. Instead, the SEC served up an absolute dumpster fire this week, and Ole Miss was the kindling for all of it.

It started with Lane Kiffin — because of course it did. In a Vanity Fair profile published May 11, Kiffin, who bolted Oxford mid-playoff-run to take the LSU job, casually mentioned that recruiting Black players to Ole Miss was harder because recruits' families would tell him, "Hey, Coach, we really like you. But my grandparents aren't letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi." He then contrasted that warmly with LSU, where apparently no one has ever heard of the Confederacy. Kiffin issued what can only be described as a 'sorry you were offended' apology, insisting in a follow-up to On3, "It wasn't calculated by bringing it up." Sure, Lane. Neither was ditching your team before the CFP, but here we are.

Then, one day later — one single day — Texas coach Steve Sarkisian apparently decided the Ole Miss pile-on had not reached sufficient altitude. In a USA Today interview about the transfer portal, Sark veered off-road and announced that at Ole Miss, "all you have to do is take basket weaving, and you can get an Ole Miss degree." The University of Texas spokesperson scrambled to say the comments were "part of a larger conversation about tampering." Sure. So was the Treaty of Versailles.

First Take immediately deployed Stephen A. Smith, who delivered a full three-minute sermon calling Sark's comments "classless," "totally wrong," and "a low damn blow" — while also informing everyone that Ole Miss has the better quarterback in Trinidad Chambliss and that Texas missed the CFP. Tim Brando posted "Beneath ya Sark" on X, achieving the rare feat of being both correct and completely irrelevant simultaneously. Florida's first-year coach Jon Sumrall, who used to work at Ole Miss, got in on it too, posting that he was "grateful to coach at a top 10 public university that also offers advanced basket weaving." It's genuinely unclear if that was a burn on Sark or on Florida. Maybe both.

Meanwhile, Greg Sankey is still out here treating CFP expansion like it's a doctoral dissertation. The Big Ten wants 24 teams. Sankey wants 16. The ACC wants 24. Several of Sankey's own coaches — Kirby Smart, Josh Heupel, Eliah Drinkwitz — apparently want 24 teams too, which means Greg Sankey is essentially the guy at Thanksgiving who won't let anyone change the channel. He did note that a decision on the 2027 format needs to be made "later this year" while simultaneously saying he needs more research. My guy has had four years and two playoff expansions to do the research.

And then there's Georgia, quietly hemorrhaging cornerstones from its 2027 recruiting class — five-star CB Donte Wright gone, four-star CB Jerry Outhouse gone — leaving the Dawgs hovering in the middle of SEC recruiting rankings like a program that fully expected to coast on its own reputation. Which, to be fair, worked great until it didn't.

Normal Tuesday in the SEC. See you in September.