Welcome to June, everybody. Official visit season is open for the 2027 recruiting class, which means coaches are legally allowed to roll out Lamborghini fleets and five-course dinners for 16-year-olds again, and the entire sport is vibrating at the frequency of a man who has had too much coffee and not enough self-restraint.
Speaking of which: Steve Sarkisian. Sir. What were you doing.
In case you missed it — and you did not miss it, it was everywhere — the Texas head coach told USA Today that the key difference between transfer portal academics at Texas versus Ole Miss is that at Texas they only accept 50% of a player's credit hours, whereas at Ole Miss, quote, "all you have to do is take basket weaving, and you can get an Ole Miss degree." He has since called this "a poor choice of words," which is the coaching equivalent of saying you accidentally drove your car into a swimming pool. [Stephen A. Smith devoted three full minutes of First Take to calling it "classless," "totally wrong," and "a low damn blow"] — and look, when Stephen A. Smith is the reasonable one in a college football beef, you have made a catastrophic miscalculation. The chef's kiss of the whole situation is that Arch Manning, Sarkisian's own quarterback, is the grandson and nephew of Ole Miss football royalty. That's not a bridge burned. That's a bridge nuked from orbit.
But wait, Sarkisian was not even the only coach dunking on Oxford that week. Lane Kiffin — in a four-hour Vanity Fair interview that no one asked for but everyone needed — told the magazine that families of top Black recruits would tell him they were hesitant to send their kids to Mississippi because of the state's history, and that those concerns "don't come up when you say Baton Rouge." Kiffin, to his credit, apologized and said it "wasn't calculated," which, sure, Lane. Paul Finebaum immediately pointed out that Kiffin "has wandering eyes" anyway and questioned whether he could even stay focused on LSU long enough to matter, which is both a fair point and the funniest thing the man has said in 2026. LSU's own athletic director felt compelled to go on ESPN and tell reporters he had spoken to his coaches "about the importance of unity within the SEC." Extremely normal things happening at a stable institution.
Meanwhile, Pete Golding — the man who replaced Kiffin at Ole Miss after Kiffin bolted mid-playoff run to take the LSU job — calmly told reporters this week that he never once considered leaving Oxford. Which is either deeply sincere or the most devastating burn in this whole saga. Probably both.
Up the prestige ladder, Kirby Smart is out here threatening secession. At the SEC spring meetings in Miramar Beach, Smart said, essentially, that if college football can't get its rules together, the SEC should just form its own league and govern itself. "I'm not afraid to break away," he said, sounding like a man who has watched one too many episodes of whatever documentary made him think he should run a country. Georgia's own president called the current system "close to anarchy." Iowa State's athletic director responded by saying "let them go" and daring the SEC to survive without baseball and track, which was unhinged and correct simultaneously.
And then there's Texas A&M coach Mike Elko, who, when asked about CFP expansion at the same meetings, said he'd prefer a 40-team playoff — because if that happened, he'd never get fired. That's not a hot take. That's a man telling you the truth in public and getting applause for it.
Welcome to June. The visits are starting. The commits are already halfway done. The coaches are melting down on the record. The SEC might be a nation-state by September. Perfectly normal.
