Lane Kiffin pokes at Jimbo Fisher for saying NIL didn't aid Texas A&M's historic 2022 recruiting class

Ole Miss football coach and semi-professional online poster Lane Kiffin had some fun at the SEC spring meetings on Tuesday. And it was Jimbo Fisher and Texas A&M landing in Kiffin’s crosshairs.

Speaking to the Houston Chronicle’s Brent Zwerneman and a gaggle of other reporters, Kiffin took aim at Fisher’s claim that NIL had nothing to do with Texas A&M signing one of the best recruiting classes ever in 2022. Kiffin wasn’t buying what is being sold.

“I struggle letting it go on those things. My SID tells me to let it go, but when someone says that NIL has nothing to do with why someone signs at their place and they signed the best class in the history of recruiting, I struggle with that statement,” Kiffin said.

I asked @Lane_Kiffin at SEC Spring Meetings about occasionally poking Jimbo Fisher with a cyber stick (I didn’t put it that colorfully, but you get the idea): pic.twitter.com/7rKDmJGXIb

— Brent Zwerneman (@BrentZwerneman) May 30, 2023

Fisher and Texas A&M became something of a cautionary tale during one of the first fully-fledged recruiting cycles in the NIL era, bringing in an abundance of talent but failing to parlay it into success on the field. A bevy of the players from the 2022 class departed after one season.

And Fisher, when the subject came up a little more than a year ago via a Nick Saban accusation, was infamously defensive.

Fisher took issue with Saban basically calling him a cheater, and said some should have “slapped him” so he would’ve learned not to cry wolf.

“You can call em anything you want to call me, you ain’t calling me a cheater,” Fisher said then. “I don’t cheat and I don’t lie. Because I learned that when I was a kid. If you did my old man slapped me across the head. Maybe someone should have slapped him. That’s one thing you don’t. Now you’re fooling with our name. .. I ain’t into that. I wasn’t raised that way.”

Kiffin sounded off then, too.

But according to the Rebels head coach, things in the coaches meeting room at the SEC meetings are pretty amicable.

“I think that room is different than I think you guys picture it as being, even last year with the Jimbo-Nick stuff,” Kiffin said. “It’s not like that in there. I think that we have jobs and part of it is whatever we do in front of the camera or out there on the field, that’s just part of the job. It’s much different in there, for the most part, with coaches. Over the years, I’ve seen coaches have spats and things like that, usually pretty good there.