Mustard may be the hottest item in Oxford this week.
With Lane Kiffin set to come back to Ole Miss on Saturday night as LSU’s coach, Walmart told AL.com that mustard sales are indeed up at its Oxford store. Robin Edie, Walmart’s director of global communications, said in an email Friday, “It seems this theory does in fact cut the mustard - love of the condiment is spreading around Oxford,” Edie wrote in response to an inquiry as to whether mustard sales have risen. ”As to why, we’ll leave the reason up to the armchair quarterbacks and chefs.”
The timing points back to Kiffin’s last trip into the Tennessee spotlight. In 2021, while he was still coaching Ole Miss, he brought the Rebels to Knoxville to face Tennessee, where he had coached in 2009 before leaving abruptly for Southern Cal. That game produced one of the SEC Network’s most memorable visuals: after a controversial call went Ole Miss’ way, Tennessee fans showered the Neyland Stadium field with garbage, and a bottle of French’s yellow mustard appeared on the grass on the broadcast.
Now Kiffin is heading back to Oxford for a 6:30 p.m. CT kickoff Saturday at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, and it’s still unclear whether Ole Miss fans will answer in kind.
Not every store around town is seeing the same bump. Kroger carries French’s mustard on sale across its national chain, but it did not respond to AL.com’s questions sent to both the Oxford location and corporate.
Chicory Market, the locally owned grocery, also did not respond. An employee at Larson’s CashSaver said mustard sales were not up as of Tuesday.
And it’s not just mustard getting a second look. A Dick’s Sporting Goods employee said the Oxford store’s golf ball sales were not up before the game, either. Golf balls, too, became part of the Kiffin memory from that 2021 Tennessee win, when he held one up in an interview with SEC Network after the game.
Oxford police won’t be the only ones on alert Saturday. Officers from multiple states are coming in for the game, with safety concerns expected to be part of the scene in what Kiffin described Monday as a hostile environment.
“I guess there’s real safety issues and stuff, so there’s people that have a plan for that,” Kiffin said during his Monday press conference in Baton Rouge. “But I told the players today, you don’t have to worry about anything as far as attention on you all week. There’s so much attention and hatred on me, you just get to go play.”
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