My plot to turn Vanity Fair into a regional Mississippi sports magazine is working! Just kidding. It’s very convenient for my pet interests that Lane Kiffin is one of the highest-paid college football coaches in the country, and perhaps the most controversial figure in the sport right now: powerful and polarizing, classic VF fodder.
Contributing editor Chris Smith zipped down to Baton Rouge to talk to Kiffin about all that, how he feels about ditching the team he built at the University of Mississippi (which, spoiler alert, Kiffin doesn’t view as an act of desertion), and why he’s loving life in Louisiana, with a $91 million contract. Some of Kiffin’s comments are bound to inflame (as an Oxford native, I can say how wonderful my hometown and the people there are), but to Chris’s point in the profile, the man courts controversy; he can’t seem to help himself.
