Look, I don’t know why sitting governors feel the need to have opinions about college football rivalries in real time, but here we are again.
Saturday night’s game was actually good, for what it’s worth. Kiffin was back in Oxford for the first time since leaving Ole Miss for LSU, and the crowd made sure he knew it. Rebels jumped out 24-7 at the half. LSU didn’t fold though ripped off 14 straight points in the third quarter to tie it at 24, and for a stretch there it genuinely felt like the Tigers were about to walk out of Vaught-Hemingway with the win. Then a fourth-down throw got picked off in the end zone and that was that. 32-24, Ole Miss.
Fine. That’s football. What happened next is the part everyone’s talking about.
Governor Tate Reeves yes, the actual governor of Mississippi hopped on X not long after the final whistle and wrote: “What does a $54 million buyout for the old coach, a $91 million contract for the new coach, and a $50 million roster get you? An a-s whipping in Oxford, Mississippi! #HottyToddy”
Petty as hell. Also, annoyingly, not inaccurate. LSU really did eat the entire $54 million buyout when they cut Brian Kelly loose after a 5-3 start last year. Then turned around and gave Kiffin seven years, $91 million, roughly 80% guaranteed. Add roster spending on top and yeah, you get to something close to that $195 million number everyone’s now quoting back at LSU fans.
The replies section turned into its own event. Somebody pointed out probably accidentally proving a point they didn’t mean to that “Gov. Reeves just essentially explained why the Protect College Sports Act is full of [it]. $145M in money for coaches means we have enough to pay the players.” Somebody else just wanted Reeves to remember who made this whole rivalry possible: none of this happens without Kiffin walking out of Oxford in the first place.
LSU fans didn’t just take it lying down either. One of them fired back with maybe the only real rebuttal available: “These dudes are acting like they won the National title or something.” And okay that’s fair. It’s one loss in September. There’s a lot of season left.
This also isn’t the first time Reeves has done this, by the way. He and Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry have been sniping at each other for a while Landry was apparently furious about the Kelly buyout too and they’d already gone back and forth once before, ahead of a Tulane-Ole Miss playoff game, when Reeves told him he “didn’t have to wait until next year to visit Oxford” and Landry clapped back that he should enjoy the team somebody else built, because next year he’d have to build his own.
Step back from the Twitter fight for a second and the actual football story is wild on its own. Kiffin left a program he’d gone 54-19 at, with five straight bowl trips and the best three-year stretch in Ole Miss history, for nine figures in Baton Rouge after Florida and LSU both came after him hard. None of that gets erased by one bad Saturday. But it sure handed every rival fanbase and apparently a sitting governor exactly the material they’d been waiting for.