Texas’ Steve Sarkisian Jumps Into College Coach War of Words, Claims Ole Miss Hands Out Degrees for ‘Basket Weaving’

The shots at the University of Mississippi keep on coming in college sports, this time with University of Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian ripping Ole Miss for supposedly having low academic standards.

Sarkisian, who has been the Longhorns head coach since 2021, took a shot at Ole Miss for their portal transfer practices during an interview with USA Today.

“At Texas, we will only take 50% of a player’s academic credit hours,” Sarkisian told USA Today’s Matt Hayes. “You may be a semester from graduating, but you’re going all the way back to 50% 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.”

He warned that college football in general is doing a disservice to players, and added, “It’s like we’ve forgotten about academics, yet less than 5% of these guys will play in the NFL.”

During the interview, Sarkisian also slammed college sports for violating NCAA rules even as the NCAA has failed to enforce them.

“We all signed up to be part of the NCAA, and then we all allegedly make the rules,” he said. “”Everyone knows the rules, right? Then we go to our attorney general and say we don’t like that rule, let’s just sue. Right now, no one is afraid of the consequences.”

Sarkisian isn’t the only head coach to take a shot at Mississippi this week. Louisiana State University head coach Lane Kiffin also took a poke at his former employer, saying that Ole Miss suffers from perceptions of racism.

The 51-year-old top coach told Vanity Fair that he sometimes had a problem getting black recruits because they worried they might face racism at the Oxford, Mississippi, campus.

Kiffin told the magazine that some recruits 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,” Kiffin continued. “Parents were sitting here this weekend saying the campus’s diversity feels so great: ‘It feels like there’s no segregation. And we want that for our kid because that’s the real world.”

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