RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. When Lane Kiffin departed Ole Miss to take the head coaching job for the LSU Tigers, some among the Rebels were worried he'd left something behind.
Walker Jones, the executive director of Grove Collective, the Rebels' name, image and likeness program, told the "Assorted Crackers" podcast how secretive they had to be amid Kiffin's exit, even to the point where they had the FBI check for listening devices.
Jones, as detailed by Ben Nagle of the Daily Mail , claimed Kiffin and his new school based in Baton Rouge tried to pillage Ole Miss for coaches and players, wreaking havoc in the process.
As Jones pointed out, it's not as if Kiffin left for an NFL team. He departed for a conference rival, a squad he'd be tasked with beating on a yearly basis.
"'I guess that's what you do if you're the LSU head coach," Jones said. "You try to destroy your opponent, your rival. So I guess that's probably the way."
Once that dynamic became apparent, Jones said the Rebels had to have duplicate levels of everything, one for current staffers and players and another for those who'd be staying into this upcoming season.
"What people don't realize too is half the staff was going to LSU, so we literally had to have two different text threads, two different staff meetings. We had to ask coaches to leave the room," he said. "We had to have no hall[way] conversations, nothing written down, nothing written on the grease boards in the office, because half the staff, we literally were going to be competing against."
When one host compared those measures to "espionage spy games," Jones detailed how accurate that description was.
"We actually had the FBI come through and walk the building for bugs and for everything," he said. "We knew kind of what was in Baton Rouge, and we knew how they operated.
"I remember getting on my knees and looking underneath the desk, like checking for, is there some sort of bug in my office? Somebody was like, 'What are you doing?' I'm like, 'You just trust me. You don't know this guy like I did.'"
It may seem extreme, but as they say, when it comes to the SEC, it just means more.
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