Who has the sleeker life, a lord or Lane Kiffin, coasting through his tousled, visored existence, swathed in softy long-sleeve cotton tees and balmy breezes of popularity at Mississippi? Kiffin has always been a boy in a bubble. The toughest event in the only quasi-professional sun-glazed life of this favored son was his firing by Southern California, which resulted in a $6 million payoff and the sale of his beach house to actor Vince Vaughn. He has never held a real-world job, and so it must have been pure, shaded ignorance about actual workplaces that made him think he could cuss a troubled player for not bowing to him like a “boss” and slur him as a “p----” after taking a mental health break.
Only in college football does a coach think he can talk to a player like Colonel Barky Von Schnauzer with impunity and then move blithely on to the Alabama game Saturday. But it turns out that DeSanto Rollins, an honor student studying business at Ole Miss, knows more about office politics than Kiffin because he evidently caught the coach on tape and filed a $40 million complaint in district court over it. And yes, that certainly sounds like Kiffin’s voice, in full tirade.
What’s most surprising — and disappointing — in the tone of the speaker on that tape is the mix of authoritarian sneer and sheer duncery. Kiffin has striven at Ole Miss to seem a cut above the average college martinet, with his frank puncturing of the usual NCAA dogmas, “Come to the Sip” irreverence and professed love of hot yoga. But the man Rollins recorded is just another nasty piece of old-school work who treats an injured and emotionally wounded player as disposable — and demeans his manhood while he’s at it.
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It seems to matter not at all to the coach in question that Rollins is a consistent Chancellor’s Honor Roll student, on track to graduate in just three years. He appears to have no use for him or interest in his problems, just scorn for the fact that he took two weeks away from the team to deal with the fact that he was too injured to play and told his future is not football. His coach’s sole concern in the conversation is the affront to his authority because Rollins refused to meet with him or work out during the mental health crisis.
“What f---in’ world do you live in?” the coach yells at him.
“I don’t see why you have to be disrespectful,” Rollins murmurs back.
“Get out of here! Go! You’re gone! You’re off the team. See ya. Go. Go. And guess what? We can kick you off the team. So go read your rights about mental health. … It’s called being a p---y! It’s called hiding behind s--- and not showin’ up to work.”
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Kiffin has a long history of surviving episodes of juvenile self-sabotage, and his aura of coaching acumen has always come with a large dose of self-interest that allowed him to hopscotch from one “dream job” to another without a backward glance of loyalty. At Ole Miss, he cultivated a more mature image and a ring of honesty. He sounded a lot more sincere than his peers, anyway, when he talked about the impact of name, image and likeness law and the broadening of the transfer portal, in terms of “free agency” and “payrolls” and the need for some regulation. He remarked in preseason, “I’ve always said that I think it’s phenomenal that players get a chance to get paid, which is great,” and added, “We’ve got professional sports because that really is what we are, what’s been created now.”
But Rollins’s claim reinvites the notion that Kiffin is one of the most unprofessional brats in the game. For one thing, Rollins and his attorney sent Kiffin and Ole Miss a lengthy tort-demand letter back in May articulating his complaints. A month later, Kiffin and his staff conveniently made a big show out of getting themselves “Mental Health First Aid certified” — while knowing that a player was demanding damages from him and the university for allegedly mistreating an emotional crisis.
Questions directed to the office of Mississippi Chancellor Glenn Boyce about the audio, whether it has been addressed with Kiffin and clarification of the school’s mental health policies drew no response. Instead, an associate athletic director acknowledged the receipt of the lawsuit and reiterated an initial statement: “DeSanto was never removed from the football team and remains on scholarship. In addition, he continues to have the opportunity to receive all of the resources and advantages that are afforded a student-athlete at the university.”
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Whatever its resolution, Rollins’s lawsuit against Kiffin and the school is a vivid reminder that college football players are still viewed by too many of their coaches as hirelings with no real rights. NIL and the transfer portal have slightly altered the gross power imbalance between coach and player. But it’s not even close to fair yet. Because what really needs regulating is the powers of coaches who may be clear-eyed about the economics of the sport but are utterly divorced from the “real world” in terms of what’s acceptable behavior between a boss and an employee.
Virtually no other boss has the leverage that a college football coach still has over players — and the illusion that they have any sense of actual managerial accountability is often just that: illusory. On the rare occasion when those coaches do enter real-world situations, they often find no one else will tolerate their abuses. Urban Meyer was the perfect illustration. He built multiple juggernauts at Florida and Ohio State when he had despotic authority over his workforce. But when he was tasked with managing grown-ups, real professionals, who didn’t have to take his crap, he failed miserably and almost instantly.
Kiffin is right when he says players should be treated like employees in terms of compensation for their heavy workweeks and that responsibility accompanies that. But just because an employee gets paid doesn’t give their boss a dehumanizing authority over them. Real leaders are cultivators of their people — they don’t dismiss and demean them.
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