Kiffin extension shows Carter's drive to sustain Ole Miss football success
Dec. 7—OXFORD — If you print out the job description of a Power Five athletics director. football would cover just a fraction of the page.
We all know the reality is more than a fraction.
Fixing football or failing to maintain its broad reach of games played, recruiting or so many other things that can impact a school's bottom line can get AD's hired and fired.
With that in mind if you polled Ole Miss fans right now you'd likely find great approval ratings for athletics director Keith Carter.
Football's going pretty good at Ole Miss right now, and it was Carter who had the vision and plan to hire Lane Kiffin.
Like any head coach hire, it was a gamble.
Kiffin was at times criticized for immature behavior before being fired at Southern Cal in 2013. Carter hoped he was catching Kiffin at a more mature stage of life, a more seasoned and educated graduate of the Nick Saban Academy for Troubled Coaches.
That's the version Kiffin has shown in two years at Ole Miss.
It's not that Kiffin has gone into a shell. He's still prone to do or say or tweet things that other coaches would not.
That's not a bad thing. That's Kiffin's personality, and you don't want to put him in box. As with most walks of life moderation is a key.
A week after being named permanent AD Carter made the choice to move on from a beloved former Ole Miss player because he saw apathy within the football program.
In two years Kiffin has taken a program working its way back from recent NCAA sanctions to 10 regular season wins for the first time in school history. He's got the Rebels back in the Sugar Bowl.
Carter's hire of Kiffin got good reviews in December of 2019, and it's fully validated two years later.
Not only is Ole Miss 10-2 and ranked No. 8 right now, but the Rebels are 14-3 in their last 17 games. Fourteen of those games are against SEC or Power Five teams. Chew on that for a minute.
More impressive than Carter's hire of Kiffin is the re-worked contract announced at the end of the SEC championship game Saturday night. Don't sleep on the symbolism there.
It's one thing to hire a coach. It's something else to keep him after he's been successful.
There's nothing in Kiffin's past to suggest he's one to put down roots or stay in one place long, and Kiffin's new deal, which will likely get him close to $8 million next year with a few easily attainable incentives, won't include a premium assisted living villa. It doesn't even guarantee he'll be in Oxford beyond the 2022 season.
But it does show Carter's commitment to maintain football for a program that has seen too much volatility while trying to recapture its storied past.
David Cutcliffe shared an SEC West title but couldn't sustain success. Nor could Houston Nutt or Hugh Freeze.
With or without Kiffin, Carter's job is to sustain success.
The extension shows he can pull together the numbers and stay in the game.
PARRISH ALFORD is the college sports editor and columnist for the Daily Journal. Contact him at parrish.alford@journalinc.com.
