Loyalty is Dead... and Sports Killed It

It’s painstakingly obvious. At Ole Miss, Lane Kiffin is persona non grata. Once he boarded that airplane and headed off into the Mississippi skyline to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Rebel fans said nothing short of good riddance.

The team that he left, the Ole Miss Rebels, became one of the four teams left in the college football playoffs. Without Lane Kiffen. While Pete Golding deserves plenty of accolades for what he has done in leading this team, the most impressive thing is that the team itself continued to play against all adversity. A win against Tulane may have been expected but their come from behind victory against the Georgia Bulldogs proved the Rebels have grit and perhaps even more so, the heart of a champion. The Ole Miss Rebels deserved to be where they were.

No thanks to Lane Kiffin.

Loyalty seems to take on a different meaning in sports. As in, there seems to be none. With the college football transfer portal, that seems clearer than ever. With super stars jumping from team to team in the NBA, it has become even more evident. Loyalty in sports is a lost art. Even Steph Curry made a nod to it in a national commercial. 16 years with the same team. Resistant to change.

Unheard of.

For the longest time, the NCAA made plenty of money from their student athletes and the same student athletes didn’t make a dime. Now, the tables have turned and have thrown the college football system into a disarray. It’s been talked about at nauseum on the national scale and whatever side of the conversation a person falls on, the topic never seems to be lacking for perspective. The same way in the NBA. Maybe it was Curry’s team that started the whole super team thing. Kevin Durant did go to Golden State, when the Warriors were already a 70-win team. Or maybe it was when Lebron left Cleveland to go to Miami. Press conference aside, Lebron did something unprecedented. The hatred towards Lebron after that increased and all Michael Jordan enthusiasts, add that to their arguments, in the endless debates of who is the real G.O.A.T.

Now, players put their futures in their hands, and they control where they want to be and how long they want to be there. Even in Major League Baseball. Juan Soto jumping from the New York Yankees to the New York Mets shows even the lack of loyalty in baseball and gives even more reason for Mets and Yankees fans to discuss the dynamics of the Subway Series.

The sports world has been completely upended.

What Kiffin did at Ole Miss really should not have been that shocking. Truthfully because Lane has done it before but mainly also because it tracks what college football is now. Yes, what he did at Ole Miss is commendable and cannot be misstated.  After several years of not being a major player in the SEC, the Rebels once again are. Recently even, a previous quarterback of the Rebels, Jaxson Dart, is now the starting quarterback for the New York Giants and is considered the future of the franchise. Lane Kiffin did, indeed, do good work in Oxford.

Then he bounced. He packed up some things and left no forwarding address. Whether or not you believe his side of the story that he wanted to coach the Rebels in playoff is really a moot point. At the end of the day, he chose to leave. If it was a lifelong dream to coach at LSU, then he should chase that dream. He has that right. But it’s also fair to share that the LSU athletic powers have left many a coach out to dry, even ones they owe millions of dollars to. $5o million dollars to be exact. So, whether it was a lifelong dream or not, it was a very risky move. Of course, Rebels fans weren’t too pleased about it. The question of loyalty came up time and time again. And to his credit, Kiffin knew what backlash he was going to receive and he still did it anyway. So, draw from that, your own conclusions.

Here we are again. That word. Loyalty.

Watching a bowl game in short terms is excruciating. Between players opting out, the head coach turnover and just the ludicrous nature of who can slap their name on a bowl game, most of them are unbearable. Not to take anything from the players who choose to play in them but as a watch on national television, it falls drastically short. And it is largely due to everything being about money. You increase the amount of money, and you increase the number of things you can sponsor. You increase the revenue. A never-ending cycle. The same thing can be said about the players going from team to team in the NBA. When was the last time the Charlotte Hornets were relevant? I’ll wait. What about the Washington Wizards? I’ll continue to wait. Once Durant, Irving and Harden left the Brooklyn Nets, what became of them? I’ll give you a hint. The head coach of that time, Steve Nash, is now an analyst on Amazon. The less marketed teams in the NBA are still struggling and only recently teams like the Detroit Pistons and Orlando Magic have proven it can be done in a different way. The NBA has struggled with their narrative so much so, that they created an in-season tournament. All things are coming back to loyalty. It’s rare that you see what happened to Luka Doncic. Rarely does a team trade their superstar player to a historic franchise for the equivalent of coffee and an egg biscuit.  Which ultimately cost somebody their job and left another franchise’s fanbase in despair.

Loyalty doesn’t exist on either side.

Growing up in the 90’s and early millennium, Michael Jordan’s Bulls were the main characters, amongst others. The Bad Boy Pistons. The Los Angeles Lakers with Shaq and Kobe. Allen Iverson and the Philadelphia 76ers. Hakeem Olajuwon and the Houston Rockets. Shaq and Penny Hardaway with Orlando Magic.

Just to name a few.

Those main characters led bitter rivalries. Led dynasties. Played in flu games, that people just simply refer to as “the flu game.” Led cultural shifts (Iverson is in his own lane on that one). Simply stated, the main characters of that era led the NBA in different ways. At its core, loyalty was never an issue. You can say maybe Shaq, with him leaving Orlando to go to LA, but he stayed long enough in both places to make definitive impacts. At the core, all those bitter games and hard fouls were defined by the fact that people simply wanted to outdo each other. That’s why players stayed where they were. It was different then. Loyalty mattered. I mean, if you want to know about loyalty, just ask MJ. The Last Dance documentary wasn’t just for entertainment; it was intentional. Times were different then. And if you ask most millennials, basketball may have been better then as well.

Close your eyes. Imagine the time when your favorite sports team filled you with joy. Like unequivocal joy. For me, it was when David Tyree caught that football on the side of his helmet in the Super Bowl against the undefeated New England Patriots. Now take that joy and remember the time your favorite sports team made you want to put your foot into your television. That is when the Giants blew game after game this football season and ended up in the same predicament as so many years past. We may have a quarterback of the future, but we don’t have a coach or a complete team yet. But that’s what fandom is all about. Even on the worst days, our loyalty to a team can be downright painful. Plenty of people would say any fan of the Giants or Jets may be asking for misery but I digress. Even with misery, loyal fans stay around. They don’t fall in love with the Kansas City Chiefs because they’ve been unstoppable for the past decade or they don’t go buy Bronco’s jerseys because Denver is good now. Loyal fans just deal with the good and the bad. That’s what loyalty is all about. You take the bruises just like you take the wins. A lifelong Red Sox fan could teach a person about loyalty.

Once money and loyalty got together, loyalty was lost. When it became about the bottom line, loyalty was erased from the wording. Blame it on college football for initially not paying their players, which caused a litany of back yard dealings that then led to the government being involved which led to the NCAA losing control of the situation. Blame it on the MLB and the Dodgers, who sign star players like buying fruit at the food market and increase the deficit in baseball each year they win the World Series. Blame it on Lebron, who guaranteed the Miami Heat would win multiple championships. That part is normally missed when people talk about THE DECISION, but it is still an important part of the story. Blame it on any of the three. They all played a role in it. Do either one of them deserve the blame more than the others? No. It takes more than one person to tango, as they say, so no one person can be to blame. At the root of it all is green paper. Or Bitcoin. Or the stock. Or whatever people in buttoned up suits talk about behind closed doors. People with a lot more money than the average person make decisions about what the average person wants to see. Instead of just asking the average person. Who really is to blame for the lack of loyalty in sports?

The answer?

Everyone.