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Pete Golding is SEC’s favorite favorite punching bag. That says more than you think
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- Pete Golding is SEC’s favorite favorite punching bag. That says more than you think
MIRAMAR BEACH, FL – So let’s go over the checklist of strays caught this offseason for Ole Miss coach Pete Golding .
His university is an academic misfit . He had a team that could’ve won the national title last season, if only he wasn’t the head coach . He’s an NCAA cheat .
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And that was from his own coaching fraternity.
“Look, I don’t worry about anything I can’t control,” Golding says.
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Here’s what he can control: The product he puts on the field, which won two games in last year’s College Football Playoff, and was within a last-second defensive stop of advancing to the national championship game.
That’s what routinely gets lost in the past five months of target practice.
Who cares if Texas coach Steve Sarkisian says Ole Miss players use basket weaving classes to graduate, or LSU coach Lane Kiffin says Ole Miss could’ve won the national title if he were in charge. Or Dabo Swinney claims Golding is a textbook cheater.
It’s all mental gymnastics. Besides, if they’re talking about you, they’re worried about you.
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Worried about a team that won 11 games in 2025, then played with more passion and emotion when Kiffin left prior to the start of the CFP. About a team that actually was good enough to win it all, and nearly did.
About a team that used a friendly local judge to get star quarterback Trinidad Chambliss — the best player in the SEC by the end of 2025 — another season of eligibility , then got it confirmed by no less than the Mississippi Supreme Court.
A team that signed a top-25 high school recruiting class, per 247Sports, and the No. 2 transfer portal class.
Despite, that is, what Kiffin said in a Vanity Fair magazine profile, clearly explaining recruits would tell him their grandparents aren’t letting them move to Oxford, Miss.
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“There’s a Lane side for us that we're buddies, and there's the professional where I have to get on his ass a little bit sometimes,” Golding said. “I get 12 messages a day from Lane. What I decide to look at … nah, we’re good.”
And that’s what this offseason of discontent is all about, anyway. Sifting through what’s important, and what isn’t.
The Swinney tampering allegation? Yep, important. Basket weaving and national championship talk? Useless noise.
So as the week wound down here at the annual SEC spring meetings, the important rose to the surface. And Golding had an answer .
Because the tampering allegations are so much more than a spat between two coaches, it’s potentially a foundational crack in an already eroding college football structure.
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It’s who contacts whom first — coaches or players or representatives — and how rampant is the cheating. If you can even call it that, considering the rule structure was built long before the NIL era.
“It’s a problem in every sport,” Golding said. “They're talking about tampering, you don't think coaches get tampered with? You don't think athletic directors meet with head coaches? I mean, we're talking about this new Kiffin (tampering) rule and all this sh—.”
He’s trying to roll with this, he really is. You don’t think he knows Swinney is ticked off, or Kiffin is still bitter about not being able to coach Ole Miss in the CFP, or Sarkisian is still annoyed that Texas playing (and losing) to Ohio State in a nonconference game cost the Longhorns a spot in the CFP?
They’re all beside themselves in this conference, where it’s winning and losing and pressing your opponent on and off the field. It’s gaining an advantage wherever you can, and pushing the envelope to the very edge.
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Sarkisian told me earlier this spring the SEC football coaches are all on a text string, and it invariably devolves into whining and moaning about the latest ill-fitting rule. Or no rule at all.
“Gets to the point where I can’t even read it,” Sarkisian said.
Now imagine being Golding, and waking up to that nonsense on a more macro level — with strays coming from your own coaching fraternity.
“I think we’re all products of our experiences,” Golding said.
No matter how many strays you’re catching.
Matt Hayes is the senior national college football writer for USA TODAY Sports Network. Follow him on X at @MattHayesCFB .
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why Pete Golding can’t stop catching strays — and why it matters now
