ESPN guru Stephen A. Smith
Where the hell has SEC commissioner Greg Sankey been as his conference’s football head coaches have been running the asylum here lately?
Anyone? Anyone?
LSU head coach Lane Kiffin calls Ole Miss a segregated if not racist university here in 2026. That comment is extremely rich as he was one of the highest-paid employees EVER in the state of Mississippi and cashed all of those checks while he was very successfully recruiting African-Americans to Oxford to be part of his Rebel football family. It was do difficult on Lane, that he earned the moniker portal king while he drew in to black recruits from one corner of America to another.
Then there’s Lane’s buddy, Steve Sarkisian, the head ball coach at Texas. Sarkisian basically accused Ole Miss of offering basket-weaving degrees at Ole Miss for football players. I can personally testify that my son, a former Ole Miss football player, holds a degree from Ole Miss in Political Science. My oldest daughter has a degree from Ole Miss in Banking and Finance.
Basket-weaving was not an option.
We’ve all heard the roar of push back against Kiffin’s stupid comments. After all, his very own LSU Tigers earned their nickname from the state’s Confederate troops during the Civil War.
Sarkisian’s comments were just as dumb.
Again, where is Sankey?
ESPN guru Stephen A. Smith swatted Sarkisian pretty good in a recent segment. Smith felt the wrath of Ole Miss women’s basketball coach Yolettt McPhee-McCuin a few weeks ago, after he made some side-eyed comments about Oxford and the university. Yo’ went on Smith’s show and invited him to a basketball game. He accepted the invitation and came to watch the Rebels play LSU in a women’s hoops matchup.
“Steve Sarkisian, that was low,” Smith said. “There’s no reason for that. There’s no reason for that whatsoever.”
Smith went on, sounding like an SEC commissioner.
“…That’s a low, damn blow,” he continued. “Ole Miss didn’t deserve that. And the athletic director (Keith Carter), who I had then pleasure of meeting when I was down at Ole Miss…and they treated me first class and all of that stuff, this is not about that.”
Smith then discussed why he, too, talked about Kiffin leaving Ole Miss.
“The fact of the matter is, I made noise, because I talked about Lane Kiffin when he was thinking about leaving. Go ahead and leave, because if you are a black man and you are not from Mississippi, and you hear the word Mississippi, whether it’s Ole Miss or Mississippi, it’s going to give you cause to pause, because from a historical perspective…Civil rights, Jim Crow laws, etc., etc. Folks walking around there with a Confederate flag. It’s an uncomfortable situation. When black folks hear Mississippi, that’s the first thought to comes in their minds.”
In my 17 years of living in Oxford and covering the Rebels, I have never personally ever seen anyone walking around carrying a CSA flag, for the record.
“But I had never been to Mississippi other than flying in for College Football Game Day, when Deion Sanders was at Jackson…Other than that, I had never been to Mississippi, or I drove though it, but that’s about it,” Smith admitted.
Still, he continued to attack Sarkisian for his basket-weaving comment.
“(Ole Miss) was in the College Football Playoffs, not Texas,” said Smith. “They’ve got a big time quarterback in (Trinidad) Chambliss, not Texas. It’s Arch Manning. We hope that he’s going to be that way, but at this point and time, (Ole Miss) has the better quarterback. They were in the College Football Playoffs. Coach (Pete) Golding did an outstanding job once Kiffin departed, despite how haphazard things were at that moment in time.
“To sit up there and make a statement like that, it is an insulting thing to the university. You’re diminishing the quality of the education that they may offer at that institution and the abundance of people out there looking to make lives for themselves, to prosper and to be happy.”
While Sankey is at the least publicly MIA, thank you Mr. Commissioner Stephen A. Smith.