By the time you read this, Lane Kiffin – former wunderkind Oakland Raiders coach, former Tennessee coach until he quit after a year causing students to riot, former USC coach until he was sacked on the tarmac at LAX – may have a new job.
That’s kinda his thing.
Kiffin has already lived multiple football lives; taking over an NFL team out of nowhere when he was 31, and a controversial figure with an undeniably gifted offensive mind, who has twice had to build his way up to the top of college football.
Now aged 50, Kiffin finds himself at the centre of one of the most bizarre coaching sagas in the sport’s history.
Because he is currently leading the University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss, to one of their greatest ever seasons.
And yet he’s likely to leave before it finishes.
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Perennial underachievers in the mighty Southeastern Conference (SEC) despite a passionate fanbase with plenty of wealthy boosters, the Rebels are finally set to return to the sport’s biggest stage, earning a place in the College Football Playoff.
Yet the conversation around Ole Miss right now isn’t about Ole Miss. It’s about Kiffin. And about whether he’ll be coaching them next year… or, indeed, next week.
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Kiffin, currently in his fifth head coaching job in 17 years, is a large fan of upward mobility. And it’s been quite clear for several years he saw Ole Miss as a stepping stone towards a (theoretically) bigger SEC job.
There are jobs where you can win the national championship, and Ole Miss hasn’t typically been one of them – they’re without a title since racial integration.
And so Kiffin, a media-friendly coach who enjoys social media as much as anyone, has loomed through several coaching cycles as a candidate to be hired up the pecking order.
But Kiffin has built his case for a bigger and better job by making Ole Miss a bigger and better job. He has done brilliantly through the modern NIL (name, image and likeness) age where players can be paid above the table and can transfer yearly, causing rosters to undergo massive change every year.
He’s done so well that he’s made Ole Miss a school where, if you squint, you could see them winning a national title.
Heading into this weekend they ranked 8th in the ESPN SP+ rankings, an all-encompassing advanced stat, and in a very even season they could absolutely go on a playoff run.
And yet Kiffin is heavily considering leaving – with reports he’s holding a team meeting on Sunday morning (US time) – for a seven-year deal at LSU, a more successful school historically.
But LSU is also a school that just sacked a high-priced coach, who they poached from powerhouse Notre Dame, and a school that’s effectively being run by the state’s governor.
To say LSU is a messy environment would be an understatement. And they’d be paying Kiffin about as much to coach there. But they’ve won multiple national titles this century, most notably with a Joe Burrow-led offensive powerhouse earlier this decade, and so they’re viewed as a better job.
Admittedly, those national titles weren’t won in the new NIL environment, so it remains to be seen over the next decade whether LSU is that much better of a job than Ole Miss. The results of the past few years would suggest not.
Generally speaking this move would not be completely ridiculous, but the timing could not be worse, with the Kiffin speculation reaching fever pitch over the last week heading into the state’s rivalry game between Ole Miss and Mississippi State – the Egg Bowl.
Ole Miss wanted a decision from Kiffin before the game, but didn’t get it. And now the entire saga has turned into a bizarre media narrative war with the sport’s main broadcaster, ESPN, effectively on Kiffin’s side.
Kiffin, like a lot of college football’s big-name coaches, is represented by super agent Jimmy Sexton. Sexton also represents Nick Saban, the legendary Alabama coach who recently retired.
So it was notable when Saban, along with most other ESPN hosts, spoke about the Kiffin situation on traditional Saturday morning pre-game show College Gameday – and presented the situation in the most positive light possible for Kiffin.
“This is not a Lane Kiffin conundrum. This is a college football conundrum that we need some leadership to step up and change the rules on how this gets done,” Saban said.
“In the NFL, you can’t leave until your team until you’ve finished playing. You can’t talk to another coach in the regular season.”
Saban blames the system itself. And, to be fair, the system sucks.
Because there is no true governing body for the sport, nobody has control of the calendar, meaning players and coaches are able to leave their teams mid-season.
It creates chaos and inevitably forces teams to make moves earlier and earlier – like the case of James Franklin, who was coaching No.3-ranked Penn State in a clash of the titans, double overtime battle against No.6 Oregon in late September… and by late November had first been sacked, and then hired to coach Virginia Tech.
So yes, the schools that want to hire Kiffin are asking him to make a move earlier than they should. In an ideal world, they would not be trying to tempt him (or any other playoff-bound coach) away before the playoffs are even finalised.
But this isn’t something that is happening to Kiffin. It is happening because of Kiffin.
He has decided to try and find a different job, and could easily just re-sign with Ole Miss if that’s his true intention. Other in-demand coaches, like Indiana’s Curt Cignetti (who has done an even better job turning a perennial struggler into a title contender than Kiffin), have rejected major interest from the market to stick around this year alone.
Heck, Kiffin could’ve just done this more quietly. But he’s not a quiet guy.
And his agent has quite clearly leveraged Kiffin’s celebrity, and the Ole Miss situation, to try and get his client a larger contract at whichever job he takes for the 2026 season.
The only winner in this entire saga will be Kiffin’s bank account.
It’s the fact that the sport’s broadcasters have spent the last two weeks trying to position Kiffin as blameless, and a victim of the situation, that has made things so much worse.
“It’s time to seriously talk about the messaging apparatus Jimmy Sexton and (his agency) CAA have created with Nick Saban, ESPN, and a perch of friendly reporters,” Washington Post and Yahoo columnist Steven Godfrey wrote last week.
“This is getting disgusting.”
While Kiffin led Ole Miss to victory in the Egg Bowl, his relationship with local media was typified by a bizarre post-game incident where he confronted a journalist who he felt had insulted him.
Reporter Ben Garrett had referenced a Ludacris lyric – “can’t turn a hoe into a housewife; hoes don’t act right” – when discussing Kiffin’s track record of changing jobs constantly.
Certainly a little ruder and more direct than is ideal, and not something we’d say about a sportsperson we cover, even if in context it’s a pop culture reference.
Whether Kiffin understood the context or not he got in Garrett’s face post-game and beckoned him inside the team’s locker room.
“You wanna walk in here and call me a hoe? We’ll see how it goes,” Kiffin quipped.
As Garrett later explained on his podcast: “I used the metaphor clunkily.
“It was more about the disloyalty of the last couple of weeks, including the brazen moves of sending family members on information-gathering missions to Baton Rouge (LSU) and Gainesville (University of Florida, another school Kiffin has considered coaching), and then have the gall to say, ‘How dare you ask about it?’”
It was a notable incident not just for its absurdity but because Kiffin has otherwise had the mainstream college football media firmly on his side, even as it became more apparent he was likely to leave.
Leading commentator Kirk Herbstreit went on College Gameday this week and declared Ole Miss had to let Kiffin keep coaching the team through the playoff – even if he signs a contract with LSU in the coming days.
This is, on its face, absurd in the modern era of college football where players are constantly being recruited for the next season.
Kiffin would obviously like to win the national title at Ole Miss, but the fact he could be recruiting his players to join him at LSU – one of Ole Miss’ biggest rivals! – next year is an enormous conflict of interest.
That’s without mentioning how his players would feel knowing their coach is quitting on them because he doesn’t think their current school is good enough for him.
Kiffin is allowed to try and find a better job. His agent is perfectly working every side of the situation to create the most attention for his client. And he’s certainly not the first head coach to leave in messy circumstances.
But this is, by some margin, the messiest situation we’ve seen in years.
And if you listened to some of the sport’s biggest names, you’d think Kiffin is blameless.
He, and the commentariat, admitting the truth would make things a whole lot smoother.
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