Lane Kiffin took the LSU job with a war chest, a fresh staff, and the kind of expectations that come standard with purple and gold. He also took it after years of needling SEC blue bloods from Oxford, which means there's a long memo of receipts on him. Mintzy has been digging through that folder all week.
First swing: Lane talking about LSU's spending like he's some scrappy underdog. Mintzy wasn't having it, pointing out that Ole Miss was the program lapping the field on NIL while everyone else figured out the rules.
The argument that Ole Miss was already playing chess on NIL while the rest of the SEC was lost in the woods.
Lane commenting on LSU big boy $$$ is quite ironic when @walkerj29 & @grovecollectnil ran circles around LSU’s NIL for 2-3 years. Ole Miss was playing chess on NIL when everyone was in wilderness. MASSIVE part of Reb success last few years & no gratitude or mention at all
Then came the temperature check from inside enemy lines. Mintzy says he's hearing from his LSU people, and the vibes are not the honeymoon you'd expect for a guy who hasn't coached a snap yet in Baton Rouge. The translation: win immediately or the fan base will eat him alive.
An LSU friend's read on Lane, relayed straight to the timeline.
The September schedule is what makes all of this more than offseason chirping. A brand new roster and a brand new staff get a road trip to Oxford and a date with Texas A&M before the calendar flips to October. That's a brutal runway for any first-year head coach, let alone one whose new fan base has reportedly burned over 100 million dollars to make this work right now.
The case that LSU's ceiling is real, but the September floor is a trapdoor.
LSU is gonna be good by end of year. But entire new roster & staff leaves them extremely vulnerable at Ole Miss & vs A&M in September. The fan reactions to 2 losses b4 October after spending over 100 million dollars def won’t be boring.
Mintzy isn't saying LSU is going to be bad. He's saying the gap between the December version of this team and the September version could be ugly, and the people writing those checks have not historically been known for patience. If Lane drops 2 before October, the loudest fan base in the league finds out exactly how thin a honeymoon can get.