COLUMN: Ole Miss football under Lane Kiffin is the Sporting Goods Scene from Step Brothers

My favorite bit from Step Brothers comes at the end of the interview montage. 

Seth Rogen is playing a sporting goods manager. Each of the brothers’ (Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly) previous interviews have gone terribly, terribly wrong. 

The movie’s premise is Ferrell and Reilly are adult men acting like teenage boys. They fight over a drum set. They want to re-arrange their room so they can have more room for activities.

You get the idea.

Rogen’s manager is a Cool Boss — more of a friend than the person in charge. He’s less concerned about their lack of resume than whether they’re Chill Enough Guys. 

“Guys I don’t mind hanging out with for, like, 12 hours a day,” he says.

Rogen explains how he appreciates how cool these adult, man-babies are; how the tuxedos they’re wearing for comedic effect are “funny” and “ironic.” 

“They underplay the whole formality,” of the interview process, Rogen makes sure to note.

“So, let’s do this! You know, you guys are hired. You’re in. Unless, you know, you’re like the weirdest guys ever and I don’t see it.”

One word (“Great,” from Ferrell) is all you get from the brothers before Reilly lifts his right butt cheek and rips a fart that lasts a full 16 seconds. And I know it lasts a full 16 seconds because I counted the seconds.

Rogen: “OK, now the tuxedos seem kind of (expletive for messed) up.”

REBEL RESET: No. 15 Ole Miss falls at No. 13 Alabama, here’s how it happened

And that’s kind of where I’m at with Lane Kiffin’s trolling and shit-posting. 

Kiffin’s said and posted a lot over his three-plus years as Ole Miss head coach. He’s asked for a lot, too, including Ryan Day (Ohio State) money ($9 million), only to deliver David Cutcliffe results.

Make no mistake; I love trash talk. Sports are inherently silly and unremarkable. So, I get why Kiffin stirs the pot. His game-week story-builds to Ole Miss kickoffs are better than anything on WWE programming these days. It’s the old adage of no press being bad press.

We encourage him because, yes, it is objectively funny when Kiffin makes fun of, say, Jimbo. But Jimbo has a national championship on his resume, while Kiffin’s best win at Ole Miss is … the Outback Bowl, I guess? The Rebels beat No. 11 Indiana that day.

Wait, no, the Hoosiers didn’t have their starting quarterback. No, no, we can’t play that game. It counts. Well, shoot, come to think of it, Tulane didn’t have its (projected-for-the-NFL) quarterback, either. Again, no, Ben. It was a win over a fellow Top 25 team at their place.

Let’s play this out further anyway. Kentucky last year? Matt Corral’s single-game heroics (with golf balls thrown in!) at Tennessee? Remember when Ole Miss ALMOST beat Alabama in a thriller of a game during Kiffin’s first season? 

I feel like Chris Farley fake-interviewing Paul McCartney on SNL.

“Remember when you were in The Beatles? That was awesome.”

Welp, no, hold on. Kiffin publicly dunked on a local media kid for daring to ask about moral victories. We all agree moral victories are lame, but Kiffin wanted everyone to know afterwards he came to Ole Miss not just to GET CLOSE to Alabama. He came to BEAT Alabama.

He expected the fans, then, to feel the same and adjust their thinking accordingly. 

Thinking accordingly adjusted!

Fans got on board and showed up in record numbers when Kiffin called out attendance last season. The student section has set and broken their own records with every new home game this season.

Whether you believed the Kiffin-to-Auburn smoke or not, it scared enough Rebel fans that the Grove Collective, the program’s NIL organization, raised millions of dollars to sign all the transfers for the, quote, ‘Portal King.’

Fans have shown far more patience than can even reasonably be expected, and yet, with each passing Big Game, Ole Miss comes out the loser. 

It’s all build and never any payoff.

I picked Ole Miss to lose to Alabama. 

The thinking was more than reasonable. Ole Miss, historically, pretty much never wins in Tuscaloosa. The Rebels have two of them all-time. They have 10, ever, over the Crimson Tide in a series that dates back to 1894. They’ve lost eight in a row. 

I expected Ole Miss to lose, and lose the Rebels did — 24-10, to drop to 3-1 on the still-very-young season; squandering a golden opportunity to seize control of the SEC West. Ole Miss has never been to Atlanta. The Rebels will have to go through someone else again — like they always but never do — if they hope to this year. Next up is No. 14 LSU. Ole Miss will probably lose that game, too. 

Because Ole Miss, under Lane Kiffin, is, frankly, all talk. He told us to get our popcorn ready, only to serve it cold with a hole in the bottom of the bucket. He alone was responsible for the Kevin Steele story this week. And Steele’s Alabama defense dominated the Offensive Wunderkind’s sputtering and not-so-scary scoring machine.

So, I’ve figured it out. The Rebels are what it would look like if the Sporting Goods Scene from Step Brothers was a football team.

It’s just not very funny. After losing to Alabama AGAIN, Kiffin Being Kiffin just seems kind of (expletive for messed) up.