Former University of Mississippi and current LSU head football coach Lane Kiffin recently set off a national controversy with comments he made in his Vanity Fair profile. “Kiffin also seems willing to indirectly invoke Ole Miss’s struggle to distance itself from symbols like the Confederate flag, Colonel Rebel, and the nickname ‘Ole Miss’ itself,” VF contributing editor Chris Smith wrote.
Kiffin told Smith that some top recruits told him, “Hey coach, we really like you, but my grandparents aren’t letting me move to Oxford. That doesn’t come up when you say Baton Rouge, Louisiana,” Kiffin continued. “Parents were sitting here [in Baton Rouge] this weekend saying the campus’s diversity feels so great: ‘It feels like there’s no segregation. And we want that for our kid because that’s the real world.’”
(The population of Baton Rouge, home to LSU’s campus, is roughly 51% Black and 36% white, according to 2024 United States census data. Oxford, home to Ole Miss, is about 66% white and 26% Black. According to The Athletic, 19% of students enrolled at LSU in the spring of 2025 were Black; about 10% of students at Ole Miss in the fall 2024 semester were Black.)
VF also recently published a profile of current University of Mississippi quarterback Trinidad Chambliss. The writer of that story, Bomani Jones, asked Chambliss’s family about his recruitment to the university, and they expressed no reservations. “I asked every single member of the Chambliss family if they had any concern about sending their son to play at the University of Mississippi, specifically with the Mississippi part,” Jones wrote on social media. “It was a ‘no’ all the way across the board.” (But, Jones added, “They still call themselves ‘rebels,’” referring to the Confederate origins of the team name.)
