While I cheer on victory for LSU on Saturday nights, I’m also reminding myself not to fumble in the game of virtue.

Everybody’s writing on Lane Kiffin going to LSU, but I want to take a different angle–a cultural-spiritual one. Take it as me talking to a thoughtful friend sippin’ on coffee or a beer.

I started writing on LSU football back in 2019. Over the years I drifted away from my childhood love of writing on sports. Not because they stopped being fun, but because I came to believe there are things far more important than games: faith, truth, conscience–the kinds of things that live beyond the final score. That’s the backbone of what I write now.

I still get a thrill from Saturday games, though. Even aware of the “bread and circuses” nature of sport I often utilize to prove points in my cultural and religious work–I find myself tuning into Saturday games, cooking and communing with friends, drinking a little too much seemingly once every fall, and feeling guilty about it in the morning. My hypocrisy knows no bounds sometimes.

I don’t think I’m alone in such inconsistencies.

I also don’t think I’m alone in being utterly stoked for opening night in Tiger Stadium against Clemson in 2026. Probably the best press conference I’ve ever watched in full yesterday, for a number of reasons.

This collision of American sport and personal conscience is exactly why the Kiffin drama feels less about him or Ole Miss–and more about a trap we all fall into: the binary trap.

So if you’ll lift up your coffee or beer with me, thoughtful friend, I’ll offer some thoughts that marry my more recent conscience in writing with a little boy who once started spinning tales about sports when the Braves and Bulls were just starting to win big.

The Trap: Binary Thinking & False Choices

The media–and now we ourselves because we’ve been programmed–thrive on good guy vs bad guy stories.

It’s in our American DNA with the Cowboys and Indians thing (bring back the Redskins!). Heck, it’s in our eternal DNA because of Genesis 3:15 and the enmity of the two seeds.

I have long been working to teach that the devil twists that true binary of Genesis–the one we should all be living by–and grafts it on to other, less important, sometimes silly binaries that turn good-natured squabbles into all out verbal warfare. I cannot imagine God is too happy when we fall into this. It provides a little spiritual context for something our publisher Scott McKay explored.

Scott opined on the issue in both The Hayride (meltards!) on Sunday and The American Spectator last night. He and I spoke the day Brian Kelly was fired, and what I gathered and have agreed with since was that none of the governor’s involvement or any of the so-called “circus” surrounding the situation–a narrative falsely created by media and keyboard warriors both–would come to fruition. I believed LSU would grab a good coach, whether that be Kiffin, Kenny Dillingham of Arizona State, Alex Golesh of South Florida, or any other of the number of solid candidates out there in this year’s cycle.

Read the following specifically to locate the insight that rejects the notion that there is good and bad–a false binary–to cling to here:

What needs to be understood is that there really aren’t any bad guys here.

You might say Kiffin is the villain, but he isn’t. He was offered a better job than the one he had. Of course, he took it. Just like Tommy Tuberville left Ole Miss for Auburn years ago. LSU is a place where three different football coaches (Nick Saban in 2003, Les Miles in 2007, and Ed Orgeron in 2019) have won national championships this century, matching Ohio State as the only school with such a distinction. Its athletic budget and fan base dwarf that of Ole Miss….

Is Kiffin a bad guy for not staying loyal to Ole Miss? Well, loyalty isn’t much of a thing in hyper-competitive SEC football. Just ask David Cutcliffe, who had a great run as the Rebels’ head coach but was packed off to the unemployment line after one bad season, the year after Eli Manning left for the NFL. Or Houston Nutt, who won a pair of Cotton Bowls in his first two years and was summarily canned after two bad seasons to follow. Kiffin is the son of Monte Kiffin, the long-time NFL assistant coach who had 20 different stops in his coaching career — what he knows is that his profession is one of the most nomadic in all of American labor. He was fired after just 20 games as the head coach of the Raiders, and he was dumped midseason as the head coach at USC after a career record of 28-15 when he was 3-2. Are you really going to preach to him about loyalty?

LSU isn’t the villain. LSU is now on its third head coach since that last national championship in 2019, and the commitment of its community, from boosters to athletic department officials to its board and even the state’s governor, Jeff Landry, to reclaiming its spot at the top is absolute. Orgeron imploded for lots of reasons, many of them having little or nothing to do with football, after winning that title, and his successor, Brian Kelly, carried a gaudy resume and massive $95 million contract into the job. But despite having been given every possible resource, the former Notre Dame coach was disengaged and checked out, and he was fired eight games into this season when it was obvious he was a poor investment. Kelly’s $54 million buyout, the second-worst in college football history, is a monument not just to bad judgment but to the commitment of LSU to winning in college football.

That Spectator column, by the way, has some fantastic ancillary posts surrounding this story. Check it out.

We love binaries–and we’ve been brainwashed into them, into casting ourselves directly into stormy and pointless dialectic after dialectic, week by week, whichever one Mockingbird media determines for us.

Even the side we agree with is a part of that dialectic.

Win or lose.

Loyalist or traitor.

Us or them.

Hoe or housewife. (Is that even spelled correctly?)

We have been programmed. We simplify. We polarize. We pick sides–and we do it fast, just to feel we are a necessary part of the conversation.

That’s why so many jumped to treat this story as an either-or scenario. The argument reduced to two frames, and the sides are either screaming or laughing hysterically at the screamers.

Justice, Mercy–and the Danger of the Mob

It’s easy to see the villain in Ole Miss fans who are behaving the way they are behaving, sure. It’s easy to leap to conclusions, to spread gossip, to judge someone on partial facts. But as Scott said in The Hayride article–and in the conversation we had weeks ago–people on “our side” were freaking out in a similar way over the governor, that LSU would never land a good coach now.

And look at what just a little time and separation have provided us.

I see it all the time with fans, friends, even myself–how quickly a small story can become a personal vendetta in our minds. One misstep, one tweet, and suddenly we’ve decided we know the whole truth.

Then the mob forms. The collective fury amplifies, fueled less by facts than by our own tribal loyalty. It feels righteous to punish, exhilarating to be part of the storm. Yet when the dust settles, we often realize how far we’ve strayed from justice and mercy, swept away by the tide of outrage.

What if the real issue isn’t side A or side B? What if the real issue is our addiction to binary choices, the way we let us vs them obscure everything else?

Because when we fall into that trap, we forget there’s often more than two sides. There’s nuance. There’s complexity. There’s context. There are innocent bystanders, flawed facts, and hidden motives. But as long as the narrative is binary, nuance disappears. As long as we happened to catch a TikTok video that aligns with our predetermined choice–no matter how untrue some of the facts may be–we latch onto it. I’ve seen this numerous times already on Facebook. It’s embarrassing.

Scott and others frame the story as a win for college football–a shakeup, a statement, a necessary calendar-changer. If there is a villain here, it is exactly that–the insanely stupid calendar the NCAA decided on. Not to mention the deeper eternal issue of the burdens and temptations associated with all that money being dumped on unprepared young souls, but as I’ve said, that angle would be entirely too far afield today.

Despite the false premise we are basing all of this Kiffin discussion on in my (non-sports) opinion, the truth is that, indeed, maybe this moment can be a reset, a chance for the powers-that-be to take accountability and get it right.

On the spiritual side, maybe it can also be a moment to reset something on our end–to re-examine how we consume sports, how we react to drama, how we treat other human beings–considering how miserable and stiff-necked, not to mention dead wrong, we can be so often.

In other words, and I’m not judging your eternal soul if your answer is yes, but I am bringing it attention out of charity: Am I condemning some Ole Miss fans for their behavior, mere weeks after I was verbally murdering Governor Landry over something that never came to fruition?

Or am I going to say no I was murdering him over his ineptitude with other things? I just hopped aboard the opportunity, truth be damned. So what if I was wrong just this one time.

Again, I spotlight this in charity. Because I know every now and then that Houston driver makes me go ballistic for ten seconds before I calm my butt down and realize how stupid it all is to get upset.

So when I see the waves of outrage–the insults, the angry airport scenes, the blanket condemnation–I feel a familiar sting. In those moments, I see again how quickly fans can become mob members, fueled more by tribal lusts than by truth.

I’ve cheered, I’ve cursed, I’ve lost sleep, I’ve let a football game affect my mood. I’ve spoken too sharply, judged too quickly. And yet, recognizing this in myself helps me extend charity toward others–and maybe helps them recognize the same in themselves.

Rash judgments. Gossip. Collective fury. A thirst to punish. One could make the argument that none of this is about Kiffin anymore–it’s about us.

This isn’t trivial. It matters more than we think. Because sins against justice–destroying a person’s good name, condemning without facts or even with them, joining the mob out of fear or anger–carry real spiritual weight. They are real sins.

In many cases, far more serious than the public sins everyone loves to talk about–because Christ Jesus’s anger with those who sinned against justice was much more terrifying than the mercy he showed those under the weight of sexual sin. Those people out there airing out Kiffin’s dirty laundry? It doesn’t matter if they’re right; it is the mortal sin of detraction (different from calumny), even when “hidden” behind social media screens, and I pray they repent of it before God Almighty gets a hold of them.

I am so glad I am Catholic because I am held accountable for things like this. I can’t just assume I am saved and behave however I like.

Because once you choose a side, the s(p)in zone forms. The snake and storm of sin feels right, soooo good. And by the time the wind and the whispers die down, by the time the media and Facebook have moved on to the next titillation, you and I don’t even feel the same things we felt when we were so murderous in our thoughts and words initially.

We have to refuse to be dragged into such a vortex of vice.

GEAUX Forward: Discernment, Charity, and the Wider View

This isn’t a call to abandon fandom, and even that may not be right and just in the eyes of God. It’s also not an effort to soften truth into indifference.

It’s a call to remember that, at its best, sports provides a microcosm not for the worst in us–but for the best.

Perhaps this story can do something that none of my political work could ever do, a lesson we can transfer to all areas of our lives:

• The world doesn’t exist in black and white, not unless you’re discerning it through the lens of the only true binary–Genesis 3:15.

• There are real people with families and pasts and pain and hopes to make it to heaven behind the controversies and soap operas on the screens.

• Mercy and justice aren’t opposites–they’re our Christian duty, two sides of the same agape love coin we are called to share. And above all, perhaps, a self-check that “justice” doesn’t mean shelling it out–it means remembering our own falleness weighing down the great cosmic scale.

• Our loyalty to truth, faith, hope, and love–to Team Christ–must outrank our loyalty to tribe.

I hope I didn’t come off as too preachy today. Really. I get the excitement, and I’m certainly not wanting to douse it. But hopefully we can do both, right? Be excited for the future of LSU football all while keeping it in its proper place. And if we’re honest–if we stay sober in the face of outrage–we can recognize when we’re being drawn into the vortex, into the binary trap. We can step back. We can question a poorly formed instinct. We can ask, is this–whatever this is inside me–the best I got?

And maybe, just maybe, the most meaningful win for college football isn’t a shiny new coach or a change in NCAA schedule or the advent of the new greatest rivalry in sport, as true and exciting as those are. Maybe it’s some of us finally waking up to the game being played off the field–in the hearts, minds, and souls of spectators.

Maybe just one fewer Ole Miss Rebel will throw a piss balloon at Lane Kiffin next season.

Maybe.

It was nice sippin’ with you, my friend. Go be a great human being for God today. And GEAUX Tigers.