Steve Sarkisian brutally shades Ole Miss’ academic standards: ‘All you have to do is take basket weaving’

Texas’ Steve Sarkisian is piling on Ole Miss.

The Longhorns head football coach ripped the Rebels’ academic standards in an interview with USA Today, one day after former Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin took his own shot at the school.

“At Texas, we will only take 50 percent of a player’s academic credit hours,” Sarkisian said while discussing transfer rules and degree requirements. “You may be a semester from graduating, but you’re going all the way back to 50 percent if you play here and want a degree. But at Ole Miss, they can take you. All you have to do is take basket weaving, and you can get an Ole Miss degree.”

Sarkisian then broadened his criticism to college football’s shifting priorities amid the transfer portal era.

“It’s like we’ve forgotten about academics, yet less than 5% of these guys will play in the NFL,” he said.

Earlier this week, Vanity Fair published an interview with LSU head coach Kiffin, during which he reportedly said that Ole Miss’ lack of diversity hurt the school’s recruiting efforts, claiming that players would tell him: “‘Hey, coach, we really like you. But my grandparents aren’t letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi.’

“That doesn’t come up when you say Baton Rouge, Louisiana,” he continued. “Parents were sitting here this weekend saying the campus’ diversity feels so great: ‘It feels like there’s no segregation. And we want that for our kid because that’s the real world.’”

Kiffin walked back his comments on Tuesday. 

“I really apologize if anybody at Ole Miss or in Mississippi was offended by that,” Kiffin told On3. 

“I was asked questions about the differences in recruiting, and I said a narrative that we battled there from some out-of-state Black parents and grandparents was not wanting their kid to move to Mississippi. That’s a narrative that coaches have been fighting forever. It wasn’t calculated by bringing it up.”