Welcome to June in the SEC, where the offseason is already its own season and nobody is even pretending to be normal anymore.

Official visit season opened for 2027 recruits on June 1, which means every program from Tuscaloosa to Oxford is welcoming elite teenagers onto campus this week with facility tours, smoky food, and the implicit promise that their NIL deal will be incredibly sick. Four-star safety Marquis Bryant committed to Kentucky this week, choosing the Wildcats over Tennessee and Auburn, announcing he is "ready to change the culture for BBN." Four-star CB Jerry Outhouse — a real person with a real name — decommitted from Georgia, holding 43 offers and apparently leaving Kirby Smart's Bulldogs to explore his options. The SEC portal machine never actually sleeps.

It just keeps grinding as the backdrop to whatever circus is currently staged on the main floor.

And the main floor lately has been a catastrophic multi-week pile-on at Ole Miss's expense. Lane Kiffin, who abandoned Oxford last November mid-playoff-run with the energy of a man sneaking out of an Airbnb at 3am, told Vanity Fair that recruiting Black players to Ole Miss was harder because grandparents worried about the school's racially troubled history. He apologized the next day, saying it "wasn't calculated." Then, roughly one sunrise later, Steve Sarkisian told USA Today that Ole Miss academics were so lax that "all you have to do is take basket weaving and you can get an Ole Miss degree." Steve Sarkisian, who coaches Arch Manning, whose grandfather Archie and uncle Eli are Ole Miss legends, said this. Into a recorder. At SEC spring meetings, Sarkisian conceded the phrase was "a poor choice of words" — which is true in the same way that saying you probably shouldn't have thrown the Molotov cocktail is technically correct.

Stephen A. Smith used three full minutes of First Take to call the remark "low," "classless," and "a low damn blow," while pointing out that Ole Miss made the College Football Playoff and Texas did not. Archie Manning had to come out and personally defend his alma mater. It is June. Archie Manning is doing crisis communications for a major university. This is where we are.

Meanwhile, Kirby Smart used the spring meetings in Destin — a location that makes every meltdown feel like it's happening at a Margaritaville — to float the idea of the SEC simply leaving the NCAA if rules can't be standardized. "I'm not afraid to break away," said the man who has already broken the sport by winning everything. The SEC threatening to flip the table and storm out is peak conference behavior.

The best performance of those meetings, though, belonged to Texas A&M's Mike Elko, who when asked about CFP expansion just told the truth. "What does Mike Elko want? 40. Then I won't get fired." He followed that with, "None of us are answering for the good of the sport. We are answering for the good of ourselves." Finally, a coach saying the quiet part loud.

The Sept. 19 Kiffin return to Oxford is already shaping up to be the most deranged afternoon in recent SEC history, and new Ole Miss head coach Pete Golding isn't even pretending otherwise. "Going to be a madhouse, an absolute madhouse, and this whole place is ready," Golding told On3. That quote deserves a T-shirt, a bumper sticker, and eventually a spot on a gravestone.