By Mark Nagi
You knew it was going to happen. We all knew it was going to happen.
Lane Kiffin once again left an employer in the lurch, putting his self-interests above everything else.
We should have listened to Al Davis, the owner of the Oakland Raiders, who called Kiffin a “professional liar” after firing him as their head coach in 2008.
Since then, his stops at Tennessee, Southern Cal, Alabama and Ole Miss have each ended with controversy. Some have ended with near riots.
But Kiffin’s talents as a play caller make college football fans and athletic directors think, “No, it’ll be different this time!”
Yeah. It won’t. It won’t be different this time.
Kiffin just led Ole Miss to its best season in over half a century… 11 wins and only a close loss to Georgia. They’ll be in the college football playoffs in a couple of weeks. But that’s not good enough for Kiffin.
Let’s backtrack for a moment. Kiffin had been at Ole Miss for six years, a really good stretch for a college football coach these days. The Rebels went 55-19 and 32-17 during that run, winning at least 10 games four times.
The rehabilitation of Kiffin has been a process, culminating in a puff piece documentary by ESPN that aired a few weeks ago. He has talked about God, giving up alcohol, and practicing hot yoga every day. He spoke about Oxford and how special a place it is, and expressed his gratitude that Ole Miss gave him the opportunity. At 50 years old, Kiffin would like you to believe that he’s matured.
However, we’ve since learned that he and CAA super-agent Jimmy Sexton have been attempting to secure Lane other jobs during that run multiple times, most notably the Alabama gig in 2024. This is the same individual who left Tennessee after just 14 months, while attempting to prevent early enrollees from matriculating.
He’s the same guy who enraged Southern Cal fans and administrators and underachieved so much that he was fired and left on an airport tarmac following a loss to Arizona State.
He’s the same guy who was fired by Nick Saban between the 2016 semifinals and CFB title game, as Saban didn’t believe he was committed to the Crimson Tide. Kiffin had accepted the Florida Atlantic head coaching job and wasn’t fulfilling his duties as their offensive coordinator. Think about it. Saban essentially gave up his best chance to win that national title because he was so fed up with Kiffin.
And now we have the most Lane Kiffin exit of all time. Stringing along fan bases from three schools, turning down Florida, quitting Ole Miss, and jumping to LSU, one of the Rebels’ biggest rivals.
He’s leaving a team that currently stands 4 wins from a national championship. Who does that?
And it gets worse. Even though he was going to be the LSU coach, he still wanted to be the Ole Miss coach in the playoffs. According to multiple credible reports, Kiffin pushed the issue so much that he threatened to take his entire offensive coaching staff with him to Baton Rouge.
Ole Miss AD Keith Carter refused to give in to blackmail because he knows what we all know. Kiffin is going to take the assistants he wants anyway and will also poach the Rebels’ roster and steer some current recruits to join him at LSU.
Lane Kiffin had never been told no by Ole Miss. They gave him everything he asked for, so of course, he thought that he could do whatever he wanted, which in this case was coaching the team as long as he wanted to, while also being the coach at LSU.
Again… LSU is one of Ole Miss’s biggest rivals.
So now Lane Kiffin has a “blue blood” job. He has every resource he needs to build a national champion, including one of the best recruiting bases in a state with no other Power 4 conference program. And make no mistake, winning a national title (or multiples) must happen for this experiment to be deemed a success. I’m sure that Lane feels that if Saban, Les Miles and Ed Orgeron can win big at LSU, he should be able to as well.
LSU fans must go into this with their eyes wide open. It’s not going to end well. It never does. What do you think is going to happen next time the Texas or Alabama jobs open, because those are the jobs Kiffin really wants? Or when an NFL owner wants to make a splash, and Sexton floats Kiffin’s name out there?
Loyalty is not in Lane Kiffin’s vocabulary.
This is who he is.
We’ve seen it before, and you can be sure that we will see it again.
