Lane Kiffin is a rascal.

That’s meant in a good way, or at least in the best way possible, but the news conference orchestrated by Kiffin on Sunday left little doubt about the SEC’s merry prankster.

Kiffin’s Ole Miss plays at Alabama on Saturday. It’s the CBS national spotlight game of the week. Getting ahead of the weekly news cycle in the SEC, Kiffin called a special get-together of reporters to casually manufacture an inflammatory narrative about his opponent.

Based on game film, Kiffin said he believes Alabama coach Nick Saban secretly demoted defensive coordinator Kevin Steele in favor of cornerbacks coach Travaris Robinson after Alabama’s embarrassing 34-24 loss to Texas. Alabama enters Ole Miss Week after a disjointed 17-3 victory against South Florida.

“It certainly seems like T-Rob’s now calling the defense,” Kiffin said. “We played him before at South Carolina, so we’re preparing accordingly, you know, for him calling the defense. He’s done a good job too. And they’ve got really good players.”

Hilarious.

It’s unscrupulous, incorrigible, speculative warcraft meant to serve as subterfuge, but at the same time hysterical. We all know by now that Kiffin loves to needle Saban, but this is artifice on an entirely different level, and I don’t mean a level up either. I mean a level down … as in way down in the debasement.

I’ll give Kiffin this much. He certainly knows how to build excitement for a big game.

It’s no secret that Kiffin wants badly to best his former boss. Alabama is vulnerable and Kiffin is eyeing a killshot. Along with everyone else, he knows this week represents Ole Miss’ best opportunity ever to seize control of the SEC West.

Famously, or perhaps infamously, Ole Miss has never played in the SEC championship game since the league went to its two-division format in 1992. This is the final season for that format and, with Alabama apparently down, the SEC West is wide open.

Is this finally the season that Ole Miss wins the SEC West? Kiffin certainly smells blood in the Crimson Tide.

In sports, people often say that there’s a game within the game. Well, in the SEC there is always a soap opera playing out inside the drama. Kiffin coached with Saban at Alabama from 2014 to 2016. He was then fired by Saban before the 2017 national championship game.

Saban hired Steele, an old friend, this offseason to replace defensive coordinator Pete Golding. Fans celebrated the move, believing that’s what Alabama needed to recapture its identity. Right or wrong, Golding was blamed for the gradual decline of Alabama’s once feared defense. But where did Golding land after his uneven time with Saban? Kiffin hired him at Ole Miss to be his new defensive coordinator.

Kiffin’s idea that Saban stripped Steele of defensive play-calling duties? Log that one away in the SEC X-files. What are the SEC X-files? That’s the place where things like the SEC’s special brand of down-home palace intrigue mixes with SEC hysteria and creates a witches’ brew of unique Southern football spice.

For a columnist, it’s like sports heaven.

“We’ve been against Kevin a number of times,” Kiffin said. “Worked with him at Alabama, then played against him at Auburn and LSU. But it seems like there’s been a change there. I don’t know what happened after the Texas game.”

And, with that, the SEC’s master of mayhem strikes again. Pure gold.

What happened after the Texas game? Well, among other things, Alabama lost its swagger.

Alabama looked like a shell of itself against the Longhorns. Against South Florida, which has been one of the worst teams in the country over the last few years, the once mighty Tide looked like a broken team without a soul.

Alabama’s decline is one of the major storylines in college football. The defense was a disaster against Texas, and then the offense was even worse against South Florida. Did Saban make a change, though? True or not, Kiffin’s gamesmanship puts even more pressure on Alabama and will invite fresh scrutiny from fans and reporters.

People say the SEC is down this year. Maybe so, but that just makes it more compelling and competitive. Our Southern theater is a carnival of the absurd and a savage delight. The SEC West will be remembered as the toughest division in the history of American sports, and the fight for the last taste of that glory begins now.

Joseph Goodman is the lead sports columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of “We Want Bama”, a book about togetherness, wild times and rum. You can find him on Twitter @JoeGoodmanJr.