Handbrake Off

There is a Top Gear bit that lives rent free in my mind at all time: notoriously anti-American and sardonic sorcerer supreme Jeremy Clarkson gushing over the Dodge Viper.

A quick synopsis: the Dodger Viper SRT-10 is a car designed to kill you. The geniuses at Dodge put the biggest fuckoff engine they could in the lightest car frame they could hammer together that could hold the 8-liter V10 engine and put little regard for how it handles under speed, not even giving the car traction control until the very latest models. It wasn’t uncommon for the exhaust, which lay under the doors, to light small fires on the car.

The Viper’s greatest safety features was not offering a roof or windows, which greatly deterred drivers from driving in the rain and wrapping it around a tree or fence post or light post or inserting it directly into a school.

It’s a stupid car that’s more akin to a horse that either only lets you ride it at a full sprint and bucks you immediately, and it’s one of the rare cars that Clarkson positively reviewed (the car that allowed him to visit his dying father only warranted an “it’s alright in my book”) and one of the extremely limited American cars he’s liked.

It’s brash, loud, and wildly unsafe, like lighting a bonfire with Everclear. But it’s fun like no other car ever made, a car you don’t drive but rather ride and hope for the best.

Let’s start with the elephant in the room: it’s shitty that Lane Kiffin had to leave Ole Miss in the midst of their greatest season this side of integration before their playoff berth. Rivalry aside, it’s bad for the sport and I hope the adjustment to the transfer portal can rectify this from happening in the future.

With that said, LSU had to do what was best for LSU, and they decided that it was getting Lane Kiffin. I’m quite sure LSU would have been fine with Lane playing out the string, but above all they have to make sure he was in purple and gold next season. It’s not LSU’s job to care for Ole Miss and part of the job is making tough decisions and having to wear criticism. That’s what the money is for.

This whole process has throughly soured many people on Lane Kiffin for abandoning his team, or trying to have his cake and eat it too. Many people nationally will root against LSU because rooting against LSU is rooting against Lane Kiffin.

That’s cool. Lane Kiffin is not here to win most popular head coach. He is here to bring LSU back to the national stage, win football games, light up the scoreboard, and make LSU fun again in that order. LSU sought out to find a head coach that can win a national championship at LSU and I believe they have done so in Lane Kiffin.

However, one thing from the Ole Miss saga that I want to bear in mind is that Lane Kiffin does not do exits well traditionally. He left Tennessee in the dead of night, was left on a tarmac at USC, subject to a 10-point slide deck presentation by Al Davis, shipped off by Saban in the middle of a playoff run, and whatever we want to call last week. The only tenure that ended reasonably well for him was FAU to Ole Miss. One day the tenure will end at LSU, and it will more likely than not will end messily. This may not be what LSU fans want to hear before he even puts together his first recruiting class, but established patterns are established patterns and you need to prepare for what the pattern ultimately suggests.

It may sound like I’m here to bury Kiffin, but I’m truthfully not. My advice and desire for LSU fans is this: buy a ticket and take a ride on the Lane Train. If we’re going to do this is, we may as well double down and enjoy it. I think handing Lane Kiffin the keys to the Dodger Viper that is LSU football only works if we let him turn off traction control. Sure, that may end up with the car in the ditch eventually, but until it departs from the road, it’ll be glorious to see what he can squeeze out of the engine available to him.

Lane is not one to demand patience from the fans, and we shouldn’t really give it to him given how his strength aside from playcalling is generative competitive rosters out of nothing. But what he does require is buy-in from the fans, even if in the back of our minds we know how it will eventually end.

If we do this right, when that day comes we’ll be able to look back to the trophy we’ve won during the Lane Kiffin era and decided that the Saturday night in Death Valley was worth the Sunday morning hangover.

“This is an open vehicle, drive carefully.”

“No.”