OXFORD, Miss. — The sun felt murderous enough that it seemed to have relocated from 93 million miles away to maybe 12. Areas of shade felt almost like a form of CPR. The peerless Ole Miss tailgate area, The Grove, throbbed with big-game bacchanal and buffets and blood-alcohol levels on Saturday, but this time with a notable art gallery popping up every now and then along the winding trail: signs depicting a certain coach, sometimes in ways that showed just how far we've come sometimes in saying, Aw, the hell with the genteel. Impasses formed in the alleyways. It all felt like bedlam plus frenzy even as veteran revelers called it tamer than anticipated. The end of time did not come. It never seems to despite frequent forecasts, but the 293rd sunrise since Nov. 30, 2025, in Oxford seemed to heave with Armageddon elements even during a calm morning, when a plane did hum overhead while pulling a sign reading, DADDY'S HOME GEAUX TIGERS. LSU's visit to Ole Miss involved three giant crockpots of melodrama -- college football, the Southeastern Conference, Ole Miss vs. LSU -- and then tacked on the Coachella of all coaching relocations, Lane Kiffin's move from Ole Miss and the doorstep of the College Football Playoff to LSU on that last Sunday of last November, when the LSU plane and the Ole Miss middle fingers outside the fences ascended.

Right from there, Nov. 19 sat way down the calendar looking like a primo festival of contempt in college football's grand tradition of contempt. Hard feelings bubbled here for the months since, then the art expressed it come Saturday at last. Some of that art had lengthy roots. One poster went way back to the Arizona night of last Jan. 9, when six or seven Ole Miss devotees left the Fiesta Bowl, where their team had just lost by a sliver in a national semifinal. They began brainstorming about Kiffin's return. "I'm the crazy, harebrained guy," said Michael Yerger, 65, an exuberant tailgate host from the Ole Miss Class of 1984. "We started on a poster that night, waiting on an Uber driver to come pick us up," he said. "At the stadium?" "At the stadium. We said, 'We cannot wait till Kiffin comes back to our Grove and our stadium.' We could not wait. And we've been planning this for months and months."

Their theme, and that of several others, stemmed from a nutty sequence last late November when Kiffin kept stringing along the town about his next career decision, and podcaster Ben Garrett quoted a Three 6 Mafia lyric about how it's hard to turn a "h-" into a "housewife." That irked Kiffin enough that he railed in a news conference, managing to lend it utmost steam when it might have faded otherwise. "I personally," Yerger said, "didn't want someone that did not want to be here. I graduated from here. My wife graduated from here. We dated here. My son, my daughter went to Ole Miss. Her mother and father went to Ole Miss. My father graduated from the University of Mississippi medical. If you don't get it, that's fine with me." But Kiffin offered such a smorgasbord of nonsense along his way out that Yerger plucked one item easily: "The fact that he got upset that we did not let him coach in the playoffs. He was already poaching and trying to take players from Ole Miss to go play at LSU, even though he said he could get players [at LSU]. Why was he taking our players? He was a cancer if we let him stay."

A different kind of work stretched back to Christmas. That's when Emily Beckemeyer conjured a naughty and nice list, which eventually led to Friday midnight and beyond.