College GameDay cohost Pat McAfee was momentarily speechless on live TV when Ole Miss fans made their feelings about former coach Lane Kiffin all too clear.
“Whatever you think about today, you can’t help but…,” McAfee, 39, trailed off on ESPN’s coverage as Ole Miss supporters began chanting “F*** Lane Kiffin” on Saturday, September 19.
With the booming chants getting louder, McAfee quipped, “OK … that wasn’t what I was thinking! It’s certainly what a lot of them are thinking!”
Saturday’s college football game between Ole Miss and LSU at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in Oxford, Mississippi, marked the first time Kiffin, 51, returned to the venue since he left his head coaching job to lead the LSU Tigers.
“Lane Kiffin, he hopped in a truck and went right down to Baton Rouge. Now, he hopped in a couple trucks to head right back here to Oxford,” McAfee joked on College GameDay.
The coach announced his departure from Oxford in November 2025 after leading the Rebels to an 11-1 regular season. At the time, Ole Miss was preparing for its first College Football Playoff appearance.
“After a lot of prayer and time spent with family, I made the difficult decision to accept the head coaching position at LSU,” Kiffin announced last November.
Kiffin said that he’d hoped to “complete a historic six season run” with Ole Miss through the playoffs so he could honor “the team’s incredible success and their commitment to finish strong.”
“My request to do so was denied by [athletic director] Keith Carter despite the team also asking him to allow me to keep coaching them so they could better maintain their high level of performance,” he added.
In the aftermath of his Ole Miss exit, Kiffin told ESPN in July that he regretted the way his move to LSU was handled.
“I think that’s a good thing that I look at life that way now, instead of saying, ‘No, I don’t. I was right,’” he argued. “I look at things always now, like, how could I have done them better? But it’s also easier when you’re further removed. There’s no emotion involved.”
Tensions are still running high on the Ole Miss campus, with Kiffin telling reporters that there were “real safety issues and stuff” ahead of Saturday’s game.
“There’s people that have a plan for that, it is what it is,” Kiffin said in a press conference on Monday, September 14. “But I told the players today, you don’t have anything to worry about as far as attention on you all week. There’s so much attention and hatred on me, you just get to go play.”
Lane’s daughter Landry — who is a student at Ole Miss — spoke out earlier this week to condemn vulgar banners from around the campus relating to her and a former Rebels football player. (Landry is actually dating LSU linebacker Whit Weeks.)
“I’m still a student at Ole Miss. I’ve loved my time here, and I love Ole Miss. So that’s what kind of makes this all even more upsetting,” Landry, 21, explained via TikTok on Wednesday, September 16. “I opened my phone this morning to pictures of banners on houses around Oxford posted on different accounts saying really inappropriate things about me and with somebody that genuinely I have never met in my life, which makes it even more frustrating to say the least.”
She pointed out that “turning a girl into the punch line of a sexual joke” should never be acceptable.
“I understand emotions are high this week and people are upset, but I am my own person,” she told viewers. “I’ll just never understand how someone can feel good about themselves putting such vulgar things about a girl on a giant banner hanging from their house. I feel like that’s really mind-blowing to me. I just hope people realize there is an actual person behind the jokes that they make.”
