That Time Ole Miss Had the Hot-Name Coach - A Farewell to Lane Kiffin

As the Lane Kiffin era of Ole Miss football draws close to its unceremonious end, I want to pay my homages to the man and bid him a fond farewell. I admit, I find the man fascinating, and I haven’t been this engaged in a news story since the covid scare. It is Ole Miss football, something I’ve followed since I was a kid, and the interest is organic and sincere; I am a native Mississippian, an Ole Miss alumnus, and I happen to bleed red and blue.

A lot like covid, it has been fun to take in all of these disparate sources of news and information and misdirection and attempt to decipher what is going on. To recap, since 2022, Kiffin has been mentioned in the coaching carousel for every open job in big-time college football. Back in 2022, Kiffin’s main suitor was Auburn. That year, Kiffin had the Rebels off to an 8-1 start, and after the Auburn rumors started swirling, the team dropped its final four games to end the season 8-5, and many people blamed that fall-off on those distractions. We learned after the fact that Kiffin had the Auburn contract on his desk, and he refused to sign it at the very last minute, remaining with the Rebels. The story out of the Kiffin camp is that his daughter swayed him at the very last minute because she just loved Ole Miss and wanted to stay, but if you believe that, check your birth certificate, because you may have been born yesterday. The real reason is that Kiffin didn’t see Auburn as much of an upgrade to Ole Miss, and I want you to think about that for a minute. Think about how far this Ole Miss program has come since 1997, when Tommy Tuberville told Ole Miss fans that he would have to be carted off of campus in a pine box, only to leave Ole Miss for Auburn two days later.

Auburn wasn’t good enough for Kiffin, but this time around, with Florida and LSU knocking, Kiffin is already gone, and you can take that to the bank, which I have said repeatedly to anyone who would listen on the message boards and in social media. I believe he will choose Florida, but he could just as easily go to LSU. I only say Florida because that somehow makes more sense to me, because I understand his ex-wife (who actually seems to function as his wife. Listen to me, Lane. Take it from someone who knows: Never marry the same woman twice), has Florida familial ties and a degree from the school. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if he chose LSU, though, which is probably the worst insult to Ole Miss Kiffin could possibly make, given that LSU is Ole Miss’ hated arch rival, but that ties into a bigger point I want to make in this piece, that those sorts of consideration matter only to fans, and they don’t mean anything to the people with real skin in the game. More on that later.

How can I be so sure Kiffin is leaving? Well, back to that story about Kffin’s daughter swaying him from Auburn. How do I know that? I know that because Kiffin’s public relations staff allowed me to know that. You see, over the past year, Kiffin’s public relations staff has been marketing him to big-name schools, going about the business of cleaning up his image, of making him seem wholesome. If you know that, you can think back on the past year and you will see that I am telling you the truth. ESPN even ran a special about Kiffin that emphasized he was a changed man who now valued family and relationships, and the media just ate it up. In 2009, Kiffin left Tennessee in a tizzy when he bolted for USC the day before national signing day, leaving Tennessee fans on the verge of rioting. He was also rumored to be quite the drinker and womanizer, and he bounced around to many different coaching jobs, all short stints. Everything you think you know about Lane Kiffin during his time at Ole Miss has been carefully curated and put out with the purpose of cleaning him up.

Furthermore, Kiffin has been asked many times point blank if he is remaining at Ole Miss, and he gives the same answer every time, that he doesn’t talk about those things during the season. He never just says, no. His refusal to declare his intentions is the source of all this media interest, of this media frenzy. Then, somehow on Monday we got a news story about his ex-wife flying to Gainesville and LSU to check out the local high schools for his son. Usually, the public never hears about such things, but somehow this time we did. The reason for that is how these big-time coaching moves are very much like soap operas for men, I think, and fans of the schools go into this tribal warfare mode. It isn’t so much a game, a pastime, as it is this tribal affair bound up in a person’s identity as an Ole Miss Rebel, as a Florida Gator, as an LSU Tiger, and so forth. Sports, and especially football, and especially college football, are a big part of the American bread and circuses.

Make no mistake about it. Kiffin is already gone, and he is going to leave under circumstances that will make him public enemy number one in Mississippi, and he was already serving that role in Tennessee. Kiffin has a 10-1 football team that is almost assured a spot in the college football playoff, which means this team will have a chance to contend for the national title, and he is going to walk away from it. Ole Miss fans will hate him forever, and to Lane Kiffin, that is completely fine. The thing about Kiffin that everyone needs to understand is that Kiffin himself understands that these sorts of things do not hurt him. Quite the opposite, actually.

Kiffin is not just a big-name celebrity coach, he is the big-name celebrity coach, and I think it is remarkable that a program like Ole Miss was positioned to employ him for the past six years. The Ole Miss program, going back to 1947 and the hiring of Johnny Vaught, used to be a powerhouse program in the era before desegregation. Vaught’s teams went toe-to-toe with the LSUs and Alabamas of the college football world, and the school claims three national titles from that period. (Those are claims and unrecognized by the NCAA, and we can debate their legitimacy, but we are talking about an era in college football in which the southern schools were on the short-end of the media bias stick in favor of the schools located in the North.) Ole Miss, with all of its rich old-South tradition, was the very last school in the SEC to admit black players, and for years after that it clung to its confederacy-based iconography, it’s Colonel Reb and its Dixie and Dixie flags, and opposing schools would use that against it in recruiting, telling black players to avoid Ole Miss. I think Ole Miss admitted its first black player in 1972 or 1973. Interestingly, although Ole Miss has bent over backwards to rid itself of this stigma, it still persists. Only yesterday on Paul Finebaum’s radio show, Stephen A. Smith said this:

“He’s in Oxford, Mississippi. OK? Let’s get this out of the way. Now listen ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to say it, y’all can’t say it. Don’t you dare say it, Paul. Don’t you dare say it, Doggie. Leave it to me. I’ll say it! The brothers ain’t trying to come to Oxford, Mississippi for the most part, compared to Gainesville or Baton Rouge, Louisiana.”

(It’s entirely unfair to characterize Ole Miss like that. Georgia was also almost just as slow to adapt, but it never has to deal with these sort of slanders. I suppose the only thing Ole Miss could do to erase that stigma is pack up and relocate to another state entirely.)

Because of Ole Miss’ slowness to adapt, and because it was steeped in the iconography of the old South, after the Vaught years the program went into a drastic decline and became a perennial doormat. When I came on the scene in the 1980s and started paying attention during the Billy Brewer years, Ole Miss was doing everything it could to get back to respectability. It was a struggle since every other program was ahead, and Ole Miss’ fan base still clung to the Confederate symbology which opposing teams used against it in recruiting black players. In the very years when college football moved into the modern media era, Ole Miss was still stuck in the past, and Brewer never found great success, but he did manage to turn in some winning seasons and get Ole Miss to a few bowl games, so the trend was upward.

It was Tommy Tuberville who made the biggest difference and set the stage for Lane Kiffin’s success. Tuberville got the Ole Miss administration to turn away from the fan-beloved confederate symbols, namely getting rid of the Dixie flags Ole Miss’ fans waved at games. He inspired a change in Ole Miss’ fan culture. Fans mildly resisted it at first, but I think the logic of it won the day, that Ole Miss was hamstrung by these symbols and if it wanted to win more football games, it had to change. Interestingly, Tuberville was the hot-name coach of that era, and he was beloved by Ole Miss fans. He, as I’ve said, like Kiffin is about to do, left Ole Miss just as soon as an obviously better opportunity came open, bolting for Auburn, but Tuberville’s influence remained. Ole Miss clawed its way back to being a program that could win football games, and Ole Miss never went back to the old confederate stuff, eventually getting rid of its mascot, Colonel Reb, and the band stopped playing Dixie. It even erected a monument to James Meredith, the first black man it enrolled during the riots of 1962.

Kiffin is the first celebrity football coach Ole Miss has ever had. Most schools never get coaches anywhere close to what Kiffin brings to the table. He’s got an aura about him. He’s good looking and media savvy, and he seems to love the media attention, and he knows how to work it. He was also able to win football games. Under Kiffin’s leadership, the Ole Miss program enjoyed sustained success and found itself relevant in the SEC, something it really hadn’t been since the days of Johnny Vaught. Ole Miss knew what it had, too, and it paid him very well, on par with the biggest names in the conference, and by all reports Kiffin got anything he wanted out of the Ole Miss administration.

Furthermore, Kiffin has been able to navigate the sea change in college sports to the NIL era better than anyone. What that means is that the old model of paying the players under the table was replaced by paying them above board, and as college football has truly begun its transition from the college student-athlete pretense to being a truly professional sports league, an NFL minor league if you will, Kiffin has gone ahead full steam, and he emphasized and marketed the Ole Miss footbal program as a fun place to be. When players score touchdowns they slam dunk a basketball on the sideline, and they do this celebration in which they spray a fire extinguisher, things that are meant to showcase how much fun they are having, and that provide great made-for-TV optics. Under Kiffin, Ole Miss became not this stodgy bastion of the old-South, but a paragon of the new South. Ole Miss was cool. It even had this really great marketing slogan, “Come to the Sip”, and whoever came up with that was a genius. It is hard to overstate this point. Kiffin made Ole Miss the place to be. So, as Kiffin makes his ugly exit, it would be wise to keep that in mind. Absolutely and beyond any doubt, Kiffin is leaving the program better than he found it. Miles and miles better.

That said, though, what he is about to do will erase every bit of good will the Ole Miss fans and administration has for him. He is going to take the job at Florida, which I think is already a done deal, and he will not be coaching Ole Miss at the football playoffs, and that is truly hard to believe, that a coach could spend six years buiding up a football program only to walk away at the point that all of that work is paying off. That is what is about to happen. I could be wrong, of course, but I don’t think so. How can we make sense of that?

From Kiffin’s perspective, and based on what I’m sure all of the people around him are telling him, Ole Miss is too small for such a big-name celebrity coach. Kiffin himself betrays this all of the time in his press conferences when he complains about the attendance at the footballs games, or the size of the stadium. He sees Ole Miss as small potatoes and beneath him. He saw Ole Miss as a stepping stone to lead him to bigger and better things. If I were in his position, and I had no Ole Miss ties, I would probably see it exactly the same way, but I don’t think it excuses abandoning this team to an interim coach in the playoffs. I think that’s about a shitty as it gets, but more than anything, it highlights in such a way that no one can miss that college football is big business, and it is foolish for fans to get all that invested in it. The old days of good old state U, of pride in one’s state, are truly things of the past. Almost none of Ole Miss’ current football players are from Mississippi. Today, the best players are going to go to the program with the best financial offers and the best coaches in the biggest media markets, which they hope will get them into the NFL. Lane Kiffin has that aura about him, and with resources and large-market media attention, he will be successful. If it is a big market like Florida, you can fully expect Florida to win a national championship. If Kiffin can get Ole Miss into the playoffs, with all of its history and how far it fell behind other SEC programs, imagine what he can do at a program with abolutely none of those negatives. If I was Kiffin, that’s exactly how I would be looking at things.

Bigger picture, though, is this: The very thing that has made college football what it is, it’s regionality that inspired loyalty among the fans, is outdated and it is nothing more than a holdover from a by-gone era, a relic, and it is time for people to understand that, and Lane Kiffin is the personification of that sea change, the very walking embodiment of the new college football as NFL minor league. Just look at him, poised to abandon this football team right when it needs him the most. He doesn’t care, I promise you that, and it is his football team. Why should you, as a fan, care?

For all the good things he did at Ole Miss, he never beat LSU at LSU, and he had a habit of losing games in the most inexplicable ways, such as last year’s implosions against Kentucky, LSU, and Florida. He was smug, and his contempt for Ole Miss was apparent to me at every press conference. I found his smugness intolerable, and if you know me, I’d warned about this outcome from day one of his hire, and I find it highly disappointing that he has proven me right. I hope Ole Miss will use this opportunity to find a guy with some character to coach its football team.

Hotty Toddy!