What LSU football coach Lane Kiffin said about recruiting at LSU, Ole Miss
· Yahoo Sports
BATON ROUGE — The pitch Lane Kiffin has used to anyone would listen for the first few months he's been on the job with LSU football is that the program, the university and the city of Baton Rouge is "just different."
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And apparently when comparing his experiences thus far between his new job with LSU and his previous at Ole Miss, to him, there are some stark differences as it relates to attracting the top football players to his teams.
In a profile piece published by Vanity Fair magazine Monday, Kiffin said the racial climate of Oxford, Mississippi, and the Ole Miss' connection to the Confederacy was a hindrance in recruiting.
"'Hey, coach, we really like you. But my grandparents aren't letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi,'" Kiffin said players would tell him during recruiting.
The Vanity Fair article then states the next day during a sitdown with Kiffin that he said he hoped his comment about Oxford and Ole Miss came across "respectful."
"There are some things that I'm saying that are factual, they're not shots," he said.
When speaking of recruiting players to LSU, Kiffin said the responses from recruits' parents and families have had a different tone.
"That doesn't come up when you say Baton Rouge, Louisiana," the LSU coach said. "Parents were sitting here this weekend saying the campus' diversity feels so great. 'It feels like there's no segregation. And we want that for our kid because that's the real world.'"
Until the middle of the 1997 football season, Confederate flags would be widely seen waving in the stands when Ole Miss scored touchdowns at home football games. At the time, former Ole Miss athletics director Pete Boone said the school was being held back by "a national perspective because of this Confederate flag." Former Ole Miss chancellor Robert Khayat placed a ban on all stick items, which included flag sticks.
Then-Rebels football coach Tommy Tuberville was happy to see the ban put into place and to see the flags disappearing during games. He went on to say that the school's connection with the flag was hurting the program's recruitment of Black players.
The best recruiting class Kiffin attracted while at Ole Miss was ranked No. 16 nationally by 247Sports but all five high school classes finished ranked inside the top 20.
Kiffin's current recruiting class with LSU sits No. 11 overall according to the 247Sports Composite.
Like many universities across the country, and particularly in the SEC, LSU has its own unsavory history of race relations that extends into athletics. The school’s athletic nickname, the Tigers, comes from a moniker given to Louisiana soldiers in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War. More recently, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry, who was prominently involved in the coaching search that brought Kiffin to LSU, has declared a state of emergency and suspended the state’s congressional primaries after an April 29 ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais that Louisiana’s majority-Black 6th Congressional District was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Cory Diaz covers the LSU Tigers for The Daily Advertiser as part of the USA TODAY Network. Follow his Tigers coverage on Twitter: @ByCoryDiaz. Got questions regarding LSU athletics? Send them to Cory Diaz at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Lafayette Daily Advertiser: Lane Kiffin says recruiting at LSU is different than Ole Miss due to racial climate