Lane Kiffin has lived what feels like nine different football lives, a remarkable feat for someone who turned 50 only 16 months ago.
He’s been a wunderkind, the 20-something USC assistant coach who was on the staff of two Trojans national championship teams and was hired as an NFL head coach at just 31 years old.
He’s been a punchline, someone who was verbally skewered by Al Davis after being fired from the then-Oakland Raiders and who was famously (and allegedly) fired by USC on an airport tarmac at 3 a.m.
Perhaps more than anything else, though, he’s been the villain. When Kiffin was fired by the Raiders, Davis described him as “a professional
liar” who “disgraced” the organization. He then left Tennessee after just one season, leaving behind an irate group of Vols fans and NCAA sanctions from his tenure that the program had to weather after he bounced. Kiffin’s lack of a filter in his public comments, and his tendency to exacerbate already delicate situations, only hurt his cause.
Two games into his first season at LSU, he’s back in that familiar role as college football’s preeminent black hat. On Saturday, Sept. 19, Kiffin will return to Mississippi, where he’ll face what figures to be a hostile crowd on hand for the No. 7 Tigers’ matchup against the No. 9 Rebels, who Kiffin left after six seasons last November in a fittingly messy divorce.
What’s maybe most notable about Kiffin’s heel turn, though, is that it was necessary at all. For an ever-so-brief period, and before leaving Ole Miss for arguably its most hated rival, Kiffin had actually become a relatively well-liked figure.
How Lane Kiffin (nearly) cleaned up his image
Following a three-year stretch as the offensive coordinator under Nick Saban at Alabama, where he helped modernize the Crimson Tide’s offense while leading it to a national championship during the 2015 season, he was hired as the head coach at Florida Atlantic.
In three seasons with the Owls, he went 26-13 and led them to the only two seasons with at least 10 wins in program history. For the first time since he was a lowly graduate assistant at Colorado State, he wasn’t coaching at a college juggernaut. Instead, he was lifting up a relatively new and overlooked FBS program to the kind of heights and national attention it had never previously received.
After the 2019 season, Kiffin left to become the head coach at Ole Miss. Even after he got back to the Power Four level, the newfound warm feelings around him didn’t vanish.
As he did in Boca Raton at FAU, he turned the Rebels into a winner behind a high-powered offense that lit up scoreboards and entertained fans across the country. His lack of discretion in his public comments, once viewed as off-putting or immature, became something more charming. His embrace of TikTok and other forms of social media, thanks to the help of his kids, showed a more humorous and self-effacing side to Kiffin, chipping away at his arrogant and standoffish reputation. The death of his father, Monte, in July 2024, and the grief he endured after it, humanized him. He quit drinking and developed a well-known fondness for hot yoga. Even his dog, a Labrador retriever named Juice, became something of a media darling.
"When you're making changes to be the best version of yourself, you learn to let go of control, to let go of your ego, to let go of the things that don't matter," Kiffin said to ESPN for a 2024 story. "Everything I ever wanted was on the other side of letting go, which is the exact opposite of how you think because you think you can't let go of anything. You're not trained that way, especially in football."
How Lane Kiffin became college football’s villain (again)
In the final weeks of his sixth season at Ole Miss, what began as whispers grew into screams — Kiffin was a top target for the head-coaching vacancy at LSU, which had somewhat surprisingly fired Brian Kelly eight games into his fourth season at the school (and paying a $54 million buyout in the process).
Surely, a reformed Kiffin wouldn’t leave a community that had embraced him with open arms and a program he had led to its greatest seasons since before the sport was integrated for one of its biggest rivals, right?
Not exactly.
For weeks, as the Rebels worked to finish off an 11-1 regular season that earned them a spot in the College Football Playoff, Kiffin was repeatedly linked to not just LSU, but Florida, which had fired Billy Napier earlier in the season. Members of his family took visits to both Gainesville, Florida and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The chatter grew so loud that an ultimatum had reportedly been issued to Kiffin that required him to decide on his future before Ole Miss’ Egg Bowl matchup against Mississippi State in the regular-season finale (Kiffin denied that such an ultimatum was ever issued).
Ultimately, after a meeting with Ole Miss’ athletic director and chancellor, it was announced that Kiffin’s future was expected the Saturday after the Egg Bowl. As a decision neared, anticipation mounted, with ESPN staked out in Oxford, Mississippi awaiting word on what was next for Kiffin.
On Sunday, Nov. 30, Kiffin ended weeks of will-he-or-won’t-he speculation by announcing he was heading to LSU, which would make him one of the highest-paid coaches in the sport. In a statement, Kiffin said he had asked the school to continue coaching the Rebels in the playoff, but that athletic director Keith Carter denied his request.
Carter’s choice made sense. How, realistically, could Kiffin be expected to keep focus on Ole Miss while preparing for his next step at LSU? Those worries were exacerbated by the fact that he might use those extra weeks with the Rebels to try to lure players and assistant coaches with him to the Tigers.
After his departure from Oxford, which was accompanied by jeering fans who made the trip to the airport, at least some of what had unexpectedly endeared him to college football fans during his Ole Miss tenure started to erode. Hot yoga instructors and patrons took to social media to complain about what they claimed to be boorish behavior by Kiffin. Unsubstantiated rumors even circulated that Juice wasn’t actually his dog.
Upon arriving at LSU, Kiffin has only become more polarizing. He attempted to bring in two of his former Ole Miss players, tight end Dae’Quan Wright and defensive lineman Zxavian Harris, who had signed NFL contracts, drawing the ire of the broader college football world and putting the Tigers in a heated standoff with the SEC that included the threat of kicking LSU out of the conference.
In anticipation of Saturday’s game, Ole Miss will be bolstering security, with additional police units being brought in from Mobile, Alabama and New Orleans for Kiffin’s. It’s an unusual step that is necessitated only by an extraordinarily reviled figure.
Then again, as he’s shown throughout his career, Kiffin is anything but normal.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Lane Kiffin rehabbed his image. Then he blew it up by leaving Ole Miss for LSU
