Lane Kiffin wasn’t ready to talk about his own game yet, even if this was his own postgame news conference.
The Ole Miss football coach fixated instead on the final moments of Vanderbilt’s stunning upset of Alabama, the nation’s top-ranked team at that moment, during the telecast of a historic win for the Commodores in Nashville.
“Sorry, I mean this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing going on,” Kiffin told reporters after his Rebels’ 27-3 win at South Carolina last Saturday. “Better watch; you’re probably not ever going to see this again.”
The Southeastern Conference’s biggest shakeups this season haven’t come courtesy of former Big 12 powers Oklahoma and Texas, who moved over this year, but from more unlikely culprits not new to the SEC.
Think Kentucky over Ole Miss, Arkansas over Tennessee, Texas A&M over Missouri. And the ultimate shocker: Vanderbilt toppling the mighty Crimson Tide for the first time in 40 years. Three SEC teams that were among the top 10 in The Associated Press poll at the time fell last weekend — two of them to unranked league brethren —and Kiffin’s Rebels had lost at home to Kentucky a week earlier.