It’s awfully amusing, because as this weekend has progressed toward what we now know was a more-or-less inevitable hire of Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin, we’ve seen the meltards go silent.

You know who the meltards are. They’re everywhere. They’re on the barstools, they showed up at Thanksgiving dinners, they’re ubiquitous online. And the LSU meltards are the ones who threw a fit over Gov. Jeff Landry taking a public position on the firing of football coach Brian Kelly and whether then-athletic director Scott Woodward should run the hiring process.

Then they threw a fit over Landry’s comments about the insanity of 10-year guaranteed contracts. And the firing of Woodward.

They told everyone who would listen, and lots of people who preferred not to, that because of the “bad PR” of the governor getting involved, LSU wouldn’t be able to get its top choice of a football coach.

When some shaky media reporting confused the issue of whether Woodward’s interim replacement, Verge Ausberry, would get the job permanently, they said new LSU President Wade Rousse was a disaster in the making. All Rousse said was that he was taking the interim tag off Ausberry while the school was running a coaching search; the local media was deliberately obtuse in pretending they didn’t understand what that meant, and the meltards seized on it to throw a fit.

Some of them actually said Landry, a massive LSU fan who graduated college at UL-Lafayette, was a Manchurian candidate governor sent to blow up the state’s flagship university. That’s how stupid this got.

And then, when Kiffin was obviously the leading candidate to take the job and when Kiffin made it very apparent he  would come if offered, the meltards trashed the potential hire and swore up and down he’d never leave Ole Miss for LSU.

Lane Kiffin did everything he could to get the job four years ago when Woodward hired Kelly. There wasn’t a whole lot of doubt that if the money and conditions were right, he would take it this year.

The complicating factor, of course, is that Kiffin has done what many would have said is impossible – he got Ole Miss to the college football playoffs this year.

That’s a wrinkle which has turned Kiffin’s hiring at LSU into an unprecedented circus. It’s much less Kiffin’s fault than it is the cruelty of the college football calendar. On Wednesday, the high school signing period begins, and better than 80 percent of the nation’s top players will sign with colleges – something which compresses the coaching search process into the regular season. Then the playoffs begin in three weeks, and while the playoffs are going on, on Jan. 2 the transfer portal opens and the shopping for players reaches a crescendo.

Given all of that, you really have to have your coach for next year set in place by Dec. 1. If that coach has a team set to go to the playoffs, tough.

It ought to be understood that Tulane’s Jon Sumrall and North Texas’ Eric Morris are headed for Florida and Oklahoma State, respectively, and one of them will win the American Athletic Conference title after they play each other on Friday. In either case, a team making the playoffs will be doing so while losing their coach – and Kiffin isn’t the only departure from a playoff team.

Or, potentially, likely Conference USA champion James Madison will get into the playoffs. JMU’s head coach Bob Chesney is also leaving – for UCLA.

Coaches leave. Very often, they leave like Kelly did – by way of getting fired. Every coach knows the axe is always threatening to fall. Kiffin was sacked on the airport tarmac at USC after losing a game to fall to 3-2 several years ago, and before that he’d been fired after just one year as the Raiders’ head coach. This isn’t to say either firing was unjust, but those experiences certainly taught him that loyalty is a very seldom-traveled two-way street.

Even so, Kiffin offered to coach Ole Miss through the playoffs. In fact, the position he took with the school’s athletic director Keith Carter was that the terms of his contract required it; if Ole Miss didn’t want him coaching they’d had to fire him and that would trigger a $36 million buyout they’d owe him.

That was the argument which complicated his exit from Oxford; Ole Miss took the position that if Kiffin wanted to go, he should go. This after spending well more than a week deluding themselves that Kiffin was going to stay in Oxford. He wasn’t, and because Carter failed to see that he got left behind as Sumrall, Morris and South Florida’s Alex Golesh, three of the hottest young coaches whose names had been tossed around as potential Kiffin replacements, signed elsewhere (Golesh is the new head coach at Auburn). Instead, Ole Miss is hiring Kiffin’s defensive coordinator Pete Golding, whose unit this year is decent but not dominating, as their new head coach in an effort to hold onto as many of their assistant coaches as possible.

But without the head coach the usual pattern is that a staff withers. And given Ole Miss’ history of being an also-ran in the SEC, the smart money would have it that they’ll regress to that mean and not have a chance to play for a national championship in December and January again any time soon.

The more practical approach would have been to swallow some pride, have Kiffin announce he’s leaving for LSU after the season and then try to send him off with a ring while hiring a hot young coach to replace him.

But Ole Miss has meltards, too. And Carter listened to them and made some impractical decisions.

So far, Kiffin has locked down LSU’s current defensive coordinator Blake Baker for another year, unless Baker ends up with a head coaching job somewhere. It’s likely that defensive ends coach Kevin Peoples, cornerbacks coach Corey Raymond and safeties coach Jake Olsen will stick around as well. Chris Kiffin, brother of the head coach and current linebackers coach at Ole Miss, is also said to be coming to join the LSU staff in some capacity, as is wide receivers coach George McDonald and offensive coordinator Charlie Weis, Jr. In addition, tight ends coach Joe Cox, inside wide receivers coach Sawyer Jordan and director of player personnel Mike Williams have been reported as joining Kiffin’s staff at LSU.

The majority of LSU fans are getting virtually all they could ask for.

Which means we’re a very long way off from the loud lament of the meltards just after Halloween. One wonders if those people will repent and offer some congratulations to Landry, Rousse and Ausberry for a job very well done.