OXFORD, Miss. --- The sun felt murderous enough that it seemed to have relocated from 93 million miles away to maybe 12. Areas of shade felt almost like a form of CPR. The peerless Ole Miss tailgate area, The Grove, throbbed with big-game bacchanal and buffets and blood-alcohol levels on Saturday, but this time with a notable art gallery popping up every now and then along the winding trail: signs depicting a certain coach, sometimes in ways that showed just how far we've come sometimes in saying, Aw, the hell with the genteel. Impasses formed in the alleyways. It all felt like bedlam plus frenzy even as veteran revelers called it tamer than anticipated.
The end of time did not come.
It never seems to despite frequent forecasts, but the 293rd sunrise since Nov. 30, 2025, in Oxford seemed to heave with Armageddon elements even during a calm morning, when a plane did hum overhead while pulling a sign reading, DADDY'S HOME GEAUX TIGERS. LSU's visit to Ole Miss involved three giant crockpots of melodrama -- college football, the Southeastern Conference, Ole Miss vs. LSU -- and then tacked on the Coachella of all coaching relocations, Lane Kiffin's move from Ole Miss and the doorstep of the College Football Playoff to LSU on that last Sunday of last November, when the LSU plane and the Ole Miss middle fingers outside the fences ascended.
Right from there, Nov. 19 sat way down the calendar looking like a primo festival of contempt in college football's grand tradition of contempt. Hard feelings bubbled here for the months since, then the art expressed it come Saturday at last. Some of that art had lengthy roots.
One poster went way back to the Arizona night of last Jan. 9, when six or seven Ole Miss devotees left the Fiesta Bowl, where their team had just lost by a sliver in a national semifinal. They began brainstorming about Kiffin's return. "I'm the crazy, harebrained guy," said Michael Yerger, 65, an exuberant tailgate host from the Ole Miss Class of 1984.
"We started on a poster that night, waiting on an Uber driver to come pick us up," he said.
"At the stadium?"
"At the stadium. We said, 'We cannot wait till Kiffin comes back to our Grove and our stadium.' We could not wait. And we've been planning this for months and months."
Their theme, and that of several others, stemmed from a nutty sequence last late November when Kiffin kept stringing along the town about his next career decision, and podcaster Ben Garrett quoted a Three 6 Mafia lyric about how it's hard to turn a "h-" into a "housewife." That irked Kiffin enough that he railed in a news conference, managing to lend it utmost steam when it might have faded otherwise.
"I personally," Yerger said, "didn't want someone that did not want to be here. I graduated from here. My wife graduated from here. We dated here. My son, my daughter went to Ole Miss. Her mother and father went to Ole Miss. My father graduated from the University of Mississippi medical. If you don't get it, that's fine with me." But Kiffin offered such a smorgasbord of nonsense along his way out that Yerger plucked one item easily: "The fact that he got upset that we did not let him coach in the playoffs. He was already poaching and trying to take players from Ole Miss to go play at LSU, even though he said he could get players [at LSU]. Why was he taking our players? He was a cancer if we let him stay."
A different kind of work stretched back to Christmas. That's when Emily Beckemeyer conjured a naughty and nice list, which eventually led to Friday midnight and beyond, when the work of her Sharpie screeched from the kitchen floor until her daughter Maddie came in and said, "What are you doing?" Eventually she would produce a list of the coaches and players who stayed, under the heading "Hotty Toddys," the Ole Miss slogan, and then one of those who left, under "Heauxs." Maddie, the middle of Emily and husband's three daughters who all went to Ole Miss, preferred the use of many names to the usual focus on just Kiffin. Her mother reiterated the nature of college football fans when she said, "I love them so much, the ones who stayed."
Of course, they all had felt -- what was it? "So it's just betrayal," Maddie said. "It's just, like, disappointment. It's like you release this [Netflix] documentary," a frequent topic under the tents because that's when Kiffin said his gracious, grateful line about needing Ole Miss more than it needed him, a famous line gone infamous. "And you're like, Oxford's home to me, and we're like, it's home to all of us, and then you pack up your s--- and left."
In some cases, the artwork evolved with the story. Beneath a tailgate tent with a banner depicting Ole Miss coach Pete Golding walking an LSU tiger and Kiffin, Scarlett Jacobs said, "We made a banner once of Lane walking a tiger" -- while Kiffin coached Ole Miss -- "and so we were like, 'We need to make it better,' make Pete walking Lane and a tiger. So it just kind of got upgraded from what it was last year. We upgraded."
An Ole Miss junior, Jacobs said she concluded it was "his own decision," but her father, Chris Jacobs, standing nearby, said, "I felt real disappointment that I was fooled, more than anger. I was disappointed that I was fooled, that everything he said, and the Netflix special they put out on him, how he's changed, how Ole Miss means more to him than he does to Ole Miss. ... He abandoned his players. He abandoned his team. I understand coaches change jobs. I understand that people change companies. But to do it when you're riding such a wave, and to leave in the middle of the season, in the middle of the playoffs, I think that was just cheap."
Down the tent trail a bit there appeared, above a sea of hummus alongside other enticements, the design of 2026 Ole Miss graduate Gabrielle Richard. She hoped for something elegant, something that would reflect The Grove without omitting Kiffin. "Welcome to Oxford," it began on the top line, followed with, "Come for the Party," and then, "Stay Longer than Lane." "I really wanted it to have the Lane piece," Richard said, "and the watercolor look, because I feel like it kind of exemplifies Oxford as a whole. And then, magnolias."
The afternoon and the sun raged on. The hospitality was such that it seemed people would rush to help even if a visitor happened to, you know, faint. Tents carried signs of any usual game -- advertisements for lawyers, for moving companies, for judgeship candidates, for quarterback Trinidad Chambliss and running back Kewan Lacy as a political ticket -- all next to the trappings of this wild Saturday. Sometimes you would see a young man in a white T-shirt with an obscene message about Kiffin, next to a young man in a blue T-shirt with the same obscene message about Kiffin, almost as if they coordinated. Lifeless stuffed tigers hung from strings. A woman proudly walked the sidewalk in a red dress and an Ole Miss light blue cap that read: HOUSEWIFE. Passersby smiled.
That came near the beginning of the fraught day, with the DADDY'S HOME plane still overhead and the student union filling up steadily. A man in there wore an elaborate Mardi Gras-style costume and carried a large replica of a corndog with Kiffin's face upon it. Jeremy and Heather King, the Ole Miss graduate parents of two Ole Miss students, made the corndog out of felt and hot glue and yarn. It refers to a 20-year-old comment from an Auburn fan about LSU fans resembling corndogs in smell, a reference heightened in 2014 when Katy Perry appeared on "GameDay" with a corndog even though Ole Miss was playing Alabama, not LSU. Jeremy King carried his oversized corndog, he said, with no animosity and with hope for goodwill -- and, true, LSU fans kept coming by to get photographed with it.
"Well, you know, I think we ran a little bit of the gamut of the emotions a little bit," King said of Kiffin's move. "We were hoping he would stay. We were having a good time [55-19 in six seasons, 11-1 last year when Kiffin left]. We thought he was a pretty good fit. He certainly wore the dress, the polo shirts and things like that, looked good, looked like Oxford. You know, at first, we wanted him to stay, and then I think after he kind of wore out his welcome stringing us along for a little while (with the deliberation). That's, I think, where the animosity built in, and I think somebody made the comment, 49 states want Ole Miss to win today because of the way he went."
Forty-eight of them might have understood, but this one had known the rarest of experiences even in the annals of coaches bolting. It carried that through the heat and into the stadium and all through the game until just before 10:30 p.m. local time, when LSU's last pass nestled into cornerback Jaylon Braxton's arms for a clinching interception with 58 seconds left, and "Dancing Queen" played, and the fans wryly sang "Callin' Baton Rouge," and the outstanding quarterback Trinidad Chambliss leapt into the stands among adoring fans. After all they had all felt, this felt like a great unleashing of relief as, once again, the end of time had not come.
