This was fitting, and probably to be expected: As Lane Kiffin boarded the private plane Sunday that would take him from Oxford, Miss., to Baton Rouge and his next coaching adventure, a gathering of University of Mississippi football fans saw him off – with boos and extended middle fingers.

Poor guy just doesn’t have much luck with airport tarmacs, does he?

Of course, the record must be tweaked for accuracy. When Kiffin was fired by then-USC athletic director Pat Haden in late September 2013, upon the team plane’s landing in L.A. following a 62-41 loss at Arizona State that left the Trojans at 3-2, Haden didn’t do the deed right on the tarmac, as has long been suggested. Instead, they retreated to a conference room in the air terminal.

““I wasn’t left on the tarmac,” Kiffin told ESPN’s Pat McAfee earlier this season. “We landed, and then the AD, in an airport side room, met with me. … he called me in at like 3 a.m. at the private airport there, and that’s where he told me.”

But while the USC firing story wasn’t as juicy as it was made out to be at the time, in the wake of Kiffin’s duplicitous dance between employers this weekend – abandoning Ole Miss for conference rival LSU, running out on a school about to reach the College Football Playoff attempting to raid the coaching staff on the way out the door after being told he couldn’t coach Ole Miss in the postseason – I can reach only one conclusion.

Haden was right.

And so was the late Al Davis, who hired Kiffin as Raiders coach in 2007, canned him in September 2008, and followed that with a bizarre press conference – or so it seemed at the time – in which he spelled out some of the reasons why he felt Kiffin “disgraced” his organization.

And that was Kiffin took the Tennessee job and was there one year before bolting for USC … and he resurrected his image after being fired here by joining Nick Saban’s staff at Alabama, only to be fired as offensive coordinator by Saban before a national championship game when he was trying to juggle his duties at Alabama with his upcoming job at Florida Atlantic.

Consider, incidentally, the current irony: Saban, by all appearances, helped Kiffin land the LSU gig … and has also said that he felt Kiffin should have been allowed to coach Ole Miss through the College Football Playoff even if he accepted the LSU job.

Nah. No conflict of interest. Nothing to see here.

(And a side note: ESPN’s Game Day show, on which Saban is one of the panelists, has never exactly been hard-hitting in its coverage of the sport – but it now is close to unwatchable. And the panelists were, in this case, lobbying for Kiffin to get his way.)

There are clashing timelines involved here that make the unsavory appear routine, just as there are in most aspects of college football. The sport’s competitive calendar, this season leading up to a championship game Jan. 19 in Miami, clashes with the football recruiting calendar (early signing dates this Wednesday through Friday, regular signing date Feb. 4) and the transfer portal window (Jan. 2-16) – the latter of which, amazingly enough, is supposedly designed to accommodate schools’ academic calendars.

The sane way to handle this would be to move the competitive calendar up, since most programs begin their seasons in August anyway, and play the national championship game on or around New Year’s Day. (Preferably at the Rose Bowl.)

But tradition trumps sanity.

So in the Southeastern Conference, you had coaching vacancies at Florida and LSU well before the season ended. You had the kingmaker of college football, agent Jimmy Sexton, who represents Kiffin, Saban and many other high profile coaches and ex-coaches, pulling the levers. And in the end, you had Kiffin forced to make a decision, trying to have it both ways by coaching Ole Miss through the playoff and then joining LSU, only to be told by Mississippi’s athletic director that that wasn’t feasible.

College football is a mess, to be honest, and contrary to the opinions of many – including a good slice of older alumni – it has little to do with the ability of the players to get paid. In fact, the shenanigans in Kiffin’s bromance with LSU only accentuate the historic hypocrisy of the sport, where coaches are forgiven – indeed, often lauded – for seeking greener pastures but players are criticized (and in the past were punished) for getting theirs.

Kiffin’s LSU contract is sweeter than that of the fired Brian Kelly: seven years, $91 million – at $13 million a season, $5 million a year more than at Ole Miss and close to $5 million a year more than Kelly was making – plus a buyout of 80% of the remaining salary if he’s fired without cause, no requirement to find another job to help offset the buyout and no reduction in payments if he does land another job.

Given those numbers, what does Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry have to say after excoriating the school and its now former athletic director Scott Woodward regarding Kelly’s contract?

And does Kiffin’s new deal, which also includes taking care of the $3 million buyout in his Ole Miss contract – and, incredibly, will include a playoff bonus for any success Mississippi might have in the CFP under replacement coach Pete Golding – mean LSU will have to do more with less when it comes to player payroll?

Kiffin might not even be the worst example of the cutthroat nature of the business. He’s just the most visible because of the frequency with which this has happened before.

Oh, and while we’re at it: Remember a few weeks ago when current USC coach Lincoln Riley put third-string quarterback Sam Huard in the same No. 80 worn by punter Sam Johnson, and then sent Huard out to throw a pass (successfully) on a fake punt against Northwestern? Riley defended it, but the Big Ten office’s interpretation was that a penalty should have been called.

It has happened before at USC, and guess who was the coach.

During a 2012 game against Colorado, backup quarterback Cody Kessler switched from his normal No. 6 to No. 35 for a half – the same number worn by punter Kyle Negrete – and played on special teams. That enabled him to take Negrete’s place as the holder for placekicks, and he ran for a two-point conversion that was called back because of a holding penalty.

At his media session three days later, Kiffin said: “We change jerseys all the time with our guys. We’ll change some more this week. Everything’s within college rules.”

Oh, and later that season USC was fined and reprimanded by the Pac-12 after a student manager was fired for underinflating several game balls after they’d been inspected by the game officials.

As Haden put it after the number change incident: “I know he’s got a reputation, a target on him, and I talk to him every single day about the best way to act.”

Eventually Haden gave up, and maybe he and Al Davis had the right idea: Dump Lane Kiffin before he dumps you.