Lane Kiffin’s quotes after LSU loss to Ole Miss prove he can’t help himself

It was clear to everybody watching just how desperately Lane Kiffin wanted to rub it in Ole Miss' face in his return to Oxford as head coach of LSU on Saturday night. And when that didn't work out, after his former quarterback Trinidad Chambliss had given his defense fits for 60 minutes in a 32-24 Ole Miss win, he resorted to that time-honored response from trolls everywhere when things don't go there way: I'm not mad, I'm actually laughing about this whole thing.

"The stadium was full an hour early," Kiffin chirped when asked about the atmosphere inside Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in his postgame press conference. "So, I guess I had to leave to get them to do that. You're welcome."

This is who Lane Kiffin is. It's who he always has been: the same guy who left Tennessee in the lurch after just one year, who once told Alshon Jeffery in the middle of a recruiting war that if he chose South Carolina "he would end up pumping gas for the rest of his life", who bailed on Ole Miss in the midst of a College Football Playoff push and then lied about it publicly while privately trying to strip the program for parts on his way out the door. And it's who he always will be, no matter how much he enjoys going on offseason press tours and telling fawning reporters about how much he's grown and changed because he does hot yoga now.

Lane Kiffin has never believed in the high road, and he wasn't about to start after Ole Miss loss

Of course, we'd be remiss if we failed to point out that Kiffin isn't wrong on the merits here. Ole Miss has long had a not-undeserved reputation as a pretty wine-and-cheese crowd by SEC standards, far more invested in hanging out in The Grove before kickoff than making life miserable for their opponents. It was true before Kiffin arrived, and it remained true even as he was building one of the more exciting programs in the country.

This, too, is part of the deal with Kiffin, who has always been far too smart a guy to act like this. Much like when he accused Urban Meyer of violating recruiting rules at Florida, he's directionally correct; he just chose to express is in the worst possible way, at the worst possible time, which just makes him come off looking like a child who has inexplicably found himself behind the wheel of his parents' car.

Really, what is he hoping to accomplish here? That everyone will forget all about the fact that his fantastically expensive football team just lost its first true test of the year, and instead pat him on the head and tell him just how clever he is? That Ole Miss fans will see the error of their ways and apologize for not giving college football's special-est boy more attention while he was around?

Kiffin can talk a big game about how far he's come as a person and a coach, about how he regrets the "mistakes" he made in departing Ole Miss last winter (though, curiously, he never specifies just what those mistakes might have been). But really, he's just gotten better at sanding down his edges for public consumption — at least, he is when he's comfortably in control of a given situation. When he's not, when he's been humiliated in front of a national TV audience and by the players he used to coach, the real Lane comes out, the insecure kid who had a coaching career handed to him on a silver platter and still hasn't been able to convince everybody of how great he thinks he is.

None of which is to take away from his merits as a head coach. He's done pretty shrewd work overhauling what was a bereft Tigers roster in the wake of the Brian Kelly era, and I have little doubt that he's going to win a heck of a lot of times in Baton Rouge. Heck, he might finally get that national title; most coaches worth their salt at LSU usually do, even if things tend to come unraveled not long after. But all of that just makes this whole act even more unbecoming; you'd think one of the best coaches in the country would be able to handle the occasional loss.

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