Court Watch #87: Winning Isn’t Everything.

By Peter Beck and Seamus Hughes

Lane Kiffin likes to win. But sometimes too much winning can end you up in federal court. 

With football season a couple of weeks away and a former coach recently making national headlines, we thought we’d start this week by turning South to the SEC, the other SEC we don’t usually get to talk about here on Court Watch, where “it just means more.” Lane Kiffin, the head coach of the University of Mississippi football team, woke up Wednesday morning to an admittedly strange request for comment from Court Watch.

Kiffin, whose Ole Miss Landsharks (editor’s note: fine…Rebels) ranked #6 in a preseason coaches poll this week, is known among college football fans for posting and occasionally trolling on Twitter, including when he teased fans tracking flights to find out who Alabama’s next head coach was and made fun of Notre Dame’s Brian Kelly for a viral video of him dancing with a high school recruit.

Now, though, Kiffin’s Twitter use is at the center of a lawsuit filed in the Northern District of Mississippi. The storied coach is being sued over a tweet. The plaintiff in the suit, Dr. Keith Bell, who the suit describes as “a world-renowned swimming psychologist” and author of the “timeless bestseller” Winning Isn’t Normal, is suing Kiffin for copyright infringement after Kiffin reportedly posted two passages from Bell’s book to his Twitter. 

In 2016, the suit alleges that Kiffin retweeted a passage from Winning Isn’t Normal before Bell’s attorneys sent a cease and desist letter, which reportedly led to Kiffin deleting the retweet. Then, six years later, Bell’s attorney says Kiffin tweeted another passage titled “Winning isn’t normal” that was “nearly [an] exact copy” of the passage Kiffin previously retweeted from Bell’s book. Bell’s attorneys claim they sent Kiffin another cease and desist letter which he did not respond to, leaving the tweet with the passage up until it was recently deleted. 

The suit argues that Kiffin’s ability to retain his competitive coaching job in the SEC, with an 8 million dollar annual salary, relies on winning, which requires a formidable presence on the recruiting trail that his tweeting helps boost. Bell’s attorneys are seeking damages for the exposure Kiffin gave the passage to his hundreds of thousands of followers.

Court Watch identified a number of lawsuits filed by Bell against educational institutions for their employees’ use of passages similar to or directly from Winning Isn’t Normal. In 2022, the Fifth Circuit agreed with a Texas District Court Judge that Bell “is a serial litigant, who makes exorbitant demands for damages in hopes of extracting disproportionate settlements.” The Fifth Circuit decided the appeal filed by Bell after the District Court Judge sided with the Eagle Mountain Saginaw Independent School District’s claim of the fair use doctrine. Bell had sued the School District when a softball team and color guard tweeted the very same passage as Kiffin purportedly did. So, to put it in football terms, this current lawsuit against Kiffin may be a bit of a Hail Mary. 

Ole Miss’ first preseason game is against the Furman Paladins on August 31st. We note, for no particular reason, that the Rebels’ opponent has a helpful copyright section on their website. 

This Week’s Roundup

• I Knew You Were Trouble: No, we don’t have the Scott Ritter search warrant yet. Yes, we’ll probably find it before anyone else. No, we’re not surprised. Yes, if history is a guide, we’ll regret reading the content of it. 

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