BATON ROUGE – The private jet landed at a Baton Rouge airport private hangar as LSU fans gathered behind a fence late Sunday afternoon.
When new Tigers’ football coach Lane Kiffin and his family emerged, the crowd began chanting “L-S-U, L-S-U” as he walked to a waiting SUV. From the passenger seat, he rolled down the window and raised a fist that drew loud cheers.
“We love you!” screamed many in the excited gathering.
An hour earlier, as the Kiffin entourage boarded the plane in Oxford where he had been Ole Miss’ coach the last six seasons, they were greeted by booing butt-hurt Ole Miss fans screaming F-bombs and flipping obscene gestures faster than Wild Bill Hickok drew pistols.
Ahh, there’s nothing like the color, pageantry and contrasting giddiness and bitterness of heisting a rival’s head coach.
Even before Kiffin is officially introduced as the Tigers’ head coach at a 3:30 p.m. press conference today, his detractors are already gigging LSU for its Louisiana Purchase, a $91 million, 7-year contract ($13 million annually) not counting bonus incentives.
They all say, “If he can be this disloyal and do this to Ole Miss, he can eventually do it to LSU. Just pick up and leave.”
To which LSU’s fans reply, “So what? We’ll throw a farewell Lane party and hire the next guy.”
Kiffin, who loves to zig just when you think he’s going to zag, left a team averaging 37.3 points and 498.1 yards, bound for the College Football Playoff, to take over a program with an imploding offense that has trouble scoring on an empty field.
There is never a textbook way to leave a head coaching job for another one. Too many hurt feelings. Dozens of angry players sold a bill of goods by the departing coach when they were recruited.
The timing is always awful. College football’s recruiting calendar is screwed up. The early signing period starts Wednesday and ends Friday. The transfer portal opens Jan. 2 and lasts two weeks.
Every media critic has taken delight in lambasting Kiffin, who’s the second-most experienced head coach (14 seasons combined at Tennessee, USC, Florida Atlantic and Ole Miss) LSU has ever hired (behind Kelly).
They said he’s the same narcissistic I-love-me-a-whole-lotta-me person he’s always been. They wonder if he has a soul. Or a heart. Or if he’s capable of any emotions.
They question his sanity.
Are you crazy, Lane? Well, are you?
Kiff-Kiff, welcome to Louisiana. We invented crazy. You should fit in beautifully.
We empty stores of bread and milk when temperatures reach the 20s, but we buy vats of liquor for hurricane parties to celebrate the possibility of getting blown to hell.
We have last names you can’t pronounce. We like to boil and eat things that swim and crawl. We have jazz funerals. Any day of any month can be a personal Mardi Gras to a Louisianian. Eat passionately. Drink like there’s no tomorrow.
We have plenty of shady politicians finding loopholes to get their palms greased. We’ve got a pint-sized governor who says something ignorant every time a transient thought circumvents his brain and escapes his mouth.
And when LSU football is fully percolating, we have 102,231 fans packing Tiger Stadium, screaming loud enough to register on a Richter scale.
At last check, Ole Miss’ Vaught-Hemingway Stadium maxes out at just over 68,000.
Apparently, size does matter as well as the fact that LSU has won three national championships under three different coaches since 2003 and produced Heisman Trophy-winning quarterbacks in 2019 and 2023.
The AP and Coaches polls have never recognized Ole Miss as a national champion. The last time the Rebels won an SEC championship was eight days after the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
There’s also the fact that the state of Mississippi annually ranks among the lowest ACT test score averages in the nation, which reduces the number of recruitable academically eligible high school athletes.
While NIL funding has somewhat leveled the recruiting playing field – Ole Miss probably has the best organized NIL collective in the SEC – head coaches still believe in building the core of their rosters with high school recruits.
Louisiana’s abundance of high school talent, which was one of the main reasons Nick Saban came to LSU in 2000 from Michigan State, is no doubt an attraction for Kiffin.
It’s understandable why there’s a section of the Ole Miss fan base that feels betrayed.
They are like LSU fans who were jaded for decades when Saban left LSU in 2004 after just five seasons to coach the NFL’s Miami Dolphins. He lasted two years before being hired in 2007 by hated LSU rival Alabama, which made the purple and gold faithful even more incensed.
Kiffin, the son of the legendary NFL defensive guru Monte Kiffin, who died in July 2024, made Ole Miss football relevant again. The Rebels have won 50 games in the last five seasons, the third most in the SEC. His progress accelerated as he dipped heavily into the transfer portal, earning him the nickname “The Portal King.”
This season’s 11-1 record (7-1 SEC) was the best coaching performance in his Oxford tenure. It came on the heels of a 10-3 (5-3 SEC) underachieving 2024 season after the Rebels supposedly bought enough portal defensive talent to challenge for a national title.
So why exit now?
Like Saban leaving LSU for the Dolphins – “I had to see if I could be NFL head coach,” he once said – Kiffin had a similar answer when he was interviewed by ESPN’s Marty Smith shortly before flying to Baton Rouge.
“This was really hard,” Kiffin said. My heart was here. But I talked to some mentors, (former USC head) Coach (Pete) Carroll, Coach Saban.
“And especially when Coach Carroll said, `Your dad would tell you to go, man, take the shot. Take the shot. You accomplished a lot here.’
“I always hated how we only gave one year to Tennessee (in 2009) and left (for USC). I really hated that feeling, even though it was an exciting year.
“I think that we gave a lot to this program and to the city, some of the most historic wins in the stadium we’ve ever had, and best regular season in the history of the school.
“I feel proud of that part. But it just became time. I talked to God and He told me it’s time to take a new step. It’s a new chapter.”
It’s for Ole Miss to swallow this simple reality. Kiffin wants to find out if he can win a national championship at a place where the pressure is more enormous than anything he’s ever experienced.
Critics be damned, he’s moving on. The dude wants ALL that smoke.
Contact Ron at ronhigginsmedia@gmail.com