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Ole Miss AD Keith Carter responds to Steve Sarkisian's viral 'basket weaving' comments

Danby: Daniel Hager05/12/26DanielHagerOn3

Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian went viral on Tuesday for a shot thrown at Ole Miss‘ football program. It did not take long, however, for Ole Miss Athletic Director Keith Carter to fire back at Sark on social media.

“At Texas, we will only take 50% of a player’s academic credit hours,” Sarkisian said, via 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.”

Carter, who has reigned as Ole Miss‘ AD since 2019, did not take kindly to those comments. He responded to Sarkisian, via X/Twitter, on Tuesday morning.

“Kind of amazing how uncomfortable our success is making some people,” Carter wrote. Ole Miss is coming off its best season in program history. It compiled a 13-2 record and made a run to the College Football Playoff Semifinal before falling to Miami in the Fiesta Bowl. Texas, however, accrued a 10-3 record and missed out on the College Football Playoff.

It appears as if Carter is calling Sarkisian and his program out for some ‘sour grapes’. These comments will surely make the SEC Meetings, which begin in two weeks in Destin, Fla., even juicier.

Ole Miss football program has been under attack from multiple head coaches this week

Along with Sarkisian, former Ole Miss and current LSU head coach Lane Kiffin came after the program this week. In an article published by Vanity Fair on Monday, Kiffin claimed that Ole Miss‘ ‘lack of diversity’ plagued him on the recruiting trail.

“(Recruits would say), ‘Hey, Coach, we really like you. But my grandparents aren’t letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi,'” Kiffin said. “That doesn’t come up when you say Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 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 later cleaned these comments up a bit in a statement given to On3’s Wilson Alexander.

“I really apologize if anybody at Ole Miss or in Mississippi was offended by that,” Kiffin said. “In a four-hour interview, I was asked a lot of questions on a lot of things, and Ole Miss has been wonderful to me and to my family. 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.”

The statement was, however, uttered, leading a warpath of Ole Miss fans against their former coach.

Fortunately for college football fans all around the country, Ole Miss will face off against both Texas and LSU on the gridiron this season. The game against LSU in Oxford on Sept. 19 will likely go down as one of the most anticipated regular season games in recent history. The Rebels will then face off against Texas on Oct. 24 in Austin.