The Hayride: Lane Kiffin Is Coming, And It Seems The LSU Meltards Have A Lot To Answer For

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It’s awfully amusing, because as this weekend has progressed toward what we now know was a more-or-less inevitable hire of Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin, we’ve seen the meltards go silent.

You know who the meltards are. They’re everywhere. They’re on the barstools, they showed up at Thanksgiving dinners, they’re ubiquitous online. And the LSU meltards are the ones who threw a fit over Gov. Jeff Landry taking a public position on the firing of football coach Brian Kelly and whether then-athletic director Scott Woodward should run the hiring process.

Then they threw a fit over Landry’s comments about the insanity of 10-year guaranteed contracts. And the firing of Woodward.

They told everyone who would listen, and lots of people who preferred not to, that because of the “bad PR” of the governor getting involved, LSU wouldn’t be able to get its top choice of a football coach.

When some shaky media reporting confused the issue of whether Woodward’s interim replacement, Verge Ausberry, would get the job permanently, they said new LSU President Wade Rousse was a disaster in the making. All Rousse said was that he was taking the interim tag off Ausberry while the school was running a coaching search; the local media was deliberately obtuse in pretending they didn’t understand what that meant, and the meltards seized on it to throw a fit.

Some of them actually said Landry, a massive LSU fan who graduated college at UL-Lafayette, was a Manchurian candidate governor sent to blow up the state’s flagship university. That’s how stupid this got.

And then, when Kiffin was obviously the leading candidate to take the job and when Kiffin made it very apparent he would come if offered, the meltards trashed the potential hire and swore up and down he’d never leave Ole Miss for LSU.

Lane Kiffin did everything he could to get the job four years ago when Woodward hired Kelly. There wasn’t a whole lot of doubt that if the money and conditions were right, he would take it this year.

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So far, Kiffin has locked down LSU’s current defensive coordinator Blake Baker for another year, unless Baker ends up with a head coaching job somewhere. It’s likely that defensive ends coach Kevin Peoples, cornerbacks coach Corey Raymond and safeties coach Jake Olsen will stick around as well. Chris Kiffin, brother of the head coach and current linebackers coach at Ole Miss, is also said to be coming to join the LSU staff in some capacity, as is wide receivers coach George McDonald and offensive coordinator Charlie Weis, Jr. In addition, tight ends coach Joe Cox, inside wide receivers coach Sawyer Jordan and director of player personnel Mike Williams have been reported as joining Kiffin’s staff at LSU.

The majority of LSU fans are getting virtually all they could ask for.

Which means we’re a very long way off from the loud lament of the meltards just after Halloween. One wonders if those people will repent and offer some congratulations to Landry, Rousse and Ausberry for a job very well done.

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