Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin and ESPN’s Paul Finebaum have been going back and forth with each other over comments Kiffin made last week at SEC Media Days about the state of college football, especially NIL.
“You just told donors you could pay players,” Kiffin said last week.“It’s a poor system that’s getting worse.” He also added that college athletics was a “disaster.”
Finebaum called Kiffin a “hypocrite” over his comments.
“I find everything that Lane says to be humorous,” Finebaum said last Thursday. “But nothing more than the hypocrisy of calling college football a disaster today because players can leave at a moment’s notice considering he walked out on Tennessee in the middle of the night for USC. And especially last year when he was secretly negotiating with Auburn while his team imploded- losing the last four games as a result. And then managed to leverage that for a $10 million a year deal.”
Kiffin clapped back at Finebaum’s comments by tweeting out what NCAA president Charlie Baker said about the current state of college athletics.
“I think it was a big mistake by the NCAA not to do a framework around NIL when they had the opportunity to,” NCAA President Charlie Baker said during the Future of College Athletics Summit last month. “And I think there were too many people in college sports who thought NO rules would work really well for them. And what everybody’s discovered is NO rules, NO transparency, NO accountability, NO framework, doesn’t work well for anybody.”
"I think it was a big mistake by the NCAA not to do a framework around NIL when they had the opportunity to," NCAA President Charlie Baker said during the Future of College Athletics Summit, not far from Capitol Hill. "And I think there were too many people in college sports who…
— Lane Kiffin (@Lane_Kiffin) July 25, 2023
Kiffin then added “Does that not sound like a DISASTER??? So crazy to point out. My bad.”
Kiffin and Finebaum have had a collegial relationship in the past but it seems as though things might be getting a little prickly between them. The Ole Miss coach also called out Finebaum last week for stirring the pot with Alabama head coach Nick Saban. Finebaum implied that if Saban didn’t make the College Football Playoff this season, it would taint Saban’s legacy, to which Kiffin quipped “Hey, thanks a lot for pissing him (Saban) off.”
It will be interesting to see how they interact with one another once the season begins.
