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Lane Kiffin couldn’t help himself on Friday night.
The Ole Miss head coach is never shy with his words, whether it’s spring practice, early in the season or during a high-stakes College Football Playoff game. The Rebels had themselves a fine regular season, going 9-3 to earn a date against Duke in the Gator Bowl on Jan. 2.
That’s all well and good, but there were grand expectations in Oxford in 2024, and Ole Miss fell well short of those expectations, including a crushing home loss to Kentucky in its SEC opener that set a bad tone when it came to making the Playoff. Ultimately, that loss haunted Kiffin and the Rebels, who still had Playoff hopes right up into Selection Sunday but were 1 of the final teams left out of the 12-team field.
Indiana, on the other hand, still got into the Playoff despite a shaky schedule and a blowout loss at Ohio State late in the season. The Hoosiers were the darling of college football this fall but then got dismantled by Notre Dame in a first-round Playoff game on Friday night in South Bend.
Kiffin, like the head coaches of the other teams that narrowly missed the Playoff, was keeping a close eye, and Kiffin felt the need to poke fun at the Playoff committee who included Indiana while leaving out SEC teams like his.
“Really exciting competitive game. Great job!!” tweeted Kiffin at the committee, as if to say his team could’ve given the Fighting Irish a far better game than the Hoosiers did.
Kiffin will always wonder how his team would’ve fared in the Playoff this season, but those 3 regular-season losses were too much to overcome.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
