Success on the field and the recruiting trail, drama everywhere else.
It is the Lane Kiffin mission statement.
In the last eight months alone, he led Ole Miss to its first College Football Playoff appearance, then left the program for LSU and a $91 million contract prior to the 12-team tournament. He brought the nation’s top transfer class to the bayou, according to 247Sports.com, and didn’t stop there, attempting to add players off NFL training camp rosters in recent weeks.
There isn’t a more polarizing figure in the entire sport than the visor-wearing, brash-talking, well-traveled Kiffin.
“He’s the biggest villain I think the sport has had in modern time,” SEC historian and ESPN college football analyst Paul Finebaum told The Post in a phone interview. “It is a great story on many levels, and the person happiest with that is Lane Kiffin. It’s who he is. I think he’s a great coach, but he’s a better puppeteer and entertainer.”
“People go, well, what’s the big deal, if they don’t follow college football. The big deal is that no one has ever done what he did last season. He walked out on a team that had a chance to win the national championship. Quite frankly, only Lane Kiffin could do that. You can tell me, top 30 coaches in America, would anyone else have done it, no, and he did it, and he got away with it.”
This isn’t new when it comes to Kiffin. He was once fired at an airport by USC. He left Tennessee following one season, leading to campus unrest after he had assured fans and recruits he wasn’t going anywhere. Nick Saban let him go as his offensive coordinator at Alabama a week before the 2017 national championship game, because Kiffin wasn’t giving the job enough attention after taking the head coaching position at Central Florida.
The noise had begun to quiet around Kiffin in recent years. He took over at Ole Miss in 2020, and turned around a program that had enjoyed only brief instances of success. He became the second Rebels coach to win at least 10 games in back-to-back seasons in 2023 and 2024, joining John Vaught. Last year, the Rebels took another step forward, looking like a national championship contender. Then, LSU came calling after firing Brian Kelly during a dismal 7-6 campaign, and Kiffin got the itch.
In typical Kiffin fashion, he attempted to walk an impossibly thin tightrope: Coach Ole Miss through the playoff while recruiting for LSU. The Rebels couldn’t possibly allow that, and athletic director Keith Carter said Kiffin knew weeks in advance if he took the LSU job, it meant someone else would be coaching the Rebels in the playoff. Kiffin took eight assistant coaches with him, including highly regarded offensive coordinator Charlie Weis Jr., although he did remain with the Rebels for their playoff run.
New Ole Miss coach Pete Golding, Kiffin’s defensive coordinator before his departure, used him as an example of how not to build a legacy. In convincing his two offensive stars, quarterback Trinidad Chambliss and running back Kewan Lacy, to remain as Rebels, he told them to Google Kiffin — “the dude they’d have built a statue of.”
“They wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire,” he told them.
Kiffin hasn’t stopped pushing boundaries. His top-notch transfer class included several Ole Miss players, such as leading tackler TJ Dottery and star edge rusher Princewill Umanmielen. That pales in comparison to the last few weeks. LSU has taken commitments from tight end Dae’Quan Wright and defensive lineman Zxavian Harris, players who signed with NFL teams. They are part of the high school class of 2022 that was denied a fifth year of eligibility despite the NCAA’s new eligibility rule that allows athletes to play five seasons in five years. That duo is part of a group that has won a temporary restraining order in Louisiana for an extra year of eligibility.
“At the end of the day, because of these rulings, they’re either going to play for you or they’re going to play for someone else around the country,” Kiffin said last week, defending his actions. “So we’ve made the decision to recruit them like probably most people are.”
The status of the players is unclear. There is a hearing for a preliminary injunction on Thursday — two days before LSU’s opener against Clemson — adding to the hoopla of Kiffin’s first season with the Tigers. It will reach a fever pitch on Sept. 19, when he returns to Oxford, Miss. A huge police presence will be needed.
“I’ve covered games that had a lot of emotion, and it’s worth remembering the game five years ago when Kiffin went back to Tennessee. That fan base hated him as well,” Finebaum said. “I didn’t think I would ever see a fan base that hated somebody as much as Tennessee hated Lane Kiffin. But this will make Tennessee look like nursery rhymes.”
Despite everything that has happened away from the field, it’s hard to argue with Kiffin’s success on it. He turned Ole Miss into a power. Saban has credited Kiffin with modernizing Alabama’s offense in his time there. He remade the LSU roster and has them ranked 11th entering the season.
“Lane has never been afraid of the work that goes into recruiting, the phone calls and all the film work to evaluate players,” said Rick Neuheisel, a SiriusXM College Sports Radio host and former Washington and UCLA coach who faced Kiffin when he was at USC. “He does as good of a job as any, there. Finding Trinidad Chambliss, for instance, last year at Ole Miss was a stroke of genius.”
It sets up a fascinating dynamic. Anything short of greatness, and Kiffin will get crushed. His off-the-field moves have created an enormous amount of pressure. He is expected to win big immediately.
There is one guarantee: Everyone will be watching the new LSU coach’s every move this fall.
