Why Tennessee football fans will (gulp!) be Lane Kiffin, Ole Miss fans on Saturday

David Whitley, Nashville Tennessean

Welcome to SEC Unfiltered, the USA TODAY NETWORK's newsletter on SEC sports. Get the latest news and insight on SEC football by subscribing to the SEC Unfiltered newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox.. Today Gainesville Sun Sports Columnist David Whitley takes over:

It’s said that politics makes strange bedfellows. With all due respect to Washington D.C., it has nothing on the SEC this Saturday.

Tennessee football fans are hitching their wagons to Lane Kiffin in the polarizing equivalent of far-left and far-right hopping into the sack together. It just doesn't happen, but college football does that to people.

Especially when an SEC championship might be on the line.

Kiffin’s Ole Miss team is playing at Georgia, which is zeroing in on (yawn) another SEC East title and perhaps a third straight national championship. But Tennessee is only one game behind the Bulldogs in the East standings.

If the Rebels beat Georgia, Tennessee will be in the driver’s seat for the title. It’s a rickety seat for sure, since the Vols would still have to beat Georgia at home the following weekend and Vanderbilt in the season finale.

But Volunteer fans can dream right?

They just never dreamed they’d be pulling for Kiffin, a guy they were throwing golf balls at the last time he showed his face at Neyland Stadium. That was in 2021, right after Ole Miss beat Tennessee 31-26 and madness ensued.

At least nobody threw a burning mattress at Kiffin. There was one of those and other bonfires in Knoxville in 2010, when Kiffin abruptly announced he was resigning as Tennessee’s coach to go to Southern Cal.

He’d only been there a year, which was plenty of time to go 7-6 and convince most SEC fans he was a smarmy smart aleck. But he was UT’s smart aleck, darn it, so Vols fans embraced him. At least until he made like Jed Clampett in “The Beverly Hillbillies” and decided Californy’s the place he ought to be…

Swimmin’ pools. Movie stars. Bad football.

So bad, USC famously fired Kiffin while the team plane was on the tarmac following a 62-41 loss to Arizona State five games into the 2013 season. Kiffin enrolled in Nick Saban’s coaching rehab clinic, got his career in order, matured a bit and has made Ole Miss into sort of a poor man’s Alabama.

The Rebels won 18 games the past two seasons and are 8-1 after beating Texas A&M last Saturday. The same Texas A&M that is cowboy-hat deep in NIL money.

Kiffin rarely misses a chance to play up how tough it is for little ol’ Ole Miss to compete with the A&Ms of the world.

“This has to be the most talented 5-3 team, not out there, but ever,” he said of the Aggies last week.

Naturally, Kiffin and the Rebels couldn’t contain themselves after beating Jimbo Fisher’s high-tax-bracket bunch.

“Money don’t win you ballgames,” QB Jaxson Dart bellowed after the 34-31 win.

Oxford is reveling in the Kiffin Era (at least when Kiffin isn’t flirting with other schools), but one thing’s been missing – A signature win.

The Rebels thought they might get it in Week 4 against a semi-sputtering Alabama team. But the Crimson Tide won 24-10, rekindling the narrative that Kiffin can’t win a big one.

There would be nothing bigger than beating Georgia, snapping the Bulldogs’ 26-game winning streak. Fans back in Oxford might light bonfires to honor Kiffin.

And most remarkable of all, Tennessee fans might join them.

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This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: Why Tennessee football fans will (gulp!) be Lane Kiffin fans Saturday

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