Welcome to June, the month when SEC coaches stop practicing football and start practicing saying things they will immediately regret in front of cameras at a Florida resort. This week's venue: Miramar Beach, Florida, where the SEC spring meetings delivered the kind of chaos that requires a cold beverage and zero investment in any of these programs.
Let's start with Steve Sarkisian, who apparently spent the last three weeks staring at a wall and thinking about what he did. Back in May, the Texas head coach told USA Today that transfer players choosing Ole Miss had it easy academically because, as he so eloquently put it, "all you have to do is take basket weaving, and you can get an Ole Miss degree." A genuinely legendary own-goal, considering Sarkisian currently coaches Arch Manning — whose grandfather Archie and uncle Eli are among the most famous Ole Miss alumni on the planet. The Manning family tree is basically Ole Miss branded, so that went well.
On Tuesday at the SEC spring meetings, Sarkisian stood before reporters and offered the time-honored non-apology apology. "I could have used macroeconomics. I could have used engineering. It wouldn't have mattered. The class was irrelevant, and that was a poor choice of words on my part." The SEC, for its part, declined to punish him. Stephen A. Smith, who had already dedicated three minutes of First Take airtime to dismantling Sarkisian, said he doesn't care what apology Texas issues and plans to ignore it completely — which is the most Stephen A. Smith sentence imaginable and also kind of correct.
Meanwhile, the other man who publicly lit Ole Miss on fire this spring, Lane Kiffin, has not tweeted since May 11. Let that sink in. Lane Kiffin. Silent on social media. For over three weeks. A Tiger Rag piece from yesterday confirmed it: no tweets, no reposts, nothing since the Vanity Fair cover story dropped and his comments about racial diversity deterring Black recruits from coming to Oxford went nuclear. His son Knox confirmed on "Jacques Talk" that dad chose to stop tweeting voluntarily. The LSU athletic director said it was purely Kiffin's call. Nobody told him to do it. The man just... stopped. A viral graphic claimed LSU administration ordered the silence; LSU denied it. The truth, as always with Kiffin, is messier and funnier than the cover story.
Here is what makes all of this so perfectly unhinged: Ole Miss — the program both of these men are enthusiastically torching while attempting to recruit against it — went to the College Football Playoff semifinal. Without Kiffin. Under Pete Golding, who told the media this week he never considered leaving and is perfectly content running Oxford while his former boss and a rival coach play a dueling press conference game in his honor. Trinidad Chambliss, Ole Miss's quarterback and the most unbothered human in this whole story, is just out there cooking.
Official visit season kicked off today, which means June is about to get even louder. Texas A&M is trending for the nation's No. 2 cornerback in the 2027 class. Oklahoma just beat Alabama and Ohio State for an elite CB commit. And somewhere in Miramar Beach, Steve Sarkisian is double-checking every metaphor he plans to use for the rest of his career. Basket weaving. What a time to be alive.
