It does not take long to assess Lane Kiffin's time at LSU, and not just because it hasn't begun yet. He has decided yet again to see how far into the campfire he can stick his face, and this time has chosen a bessemer furnace to test his hide. Put another way, Kiffin has brought the concept of heatedly saying the word "hoe" back into mainstream conversation, which is more than can be said for any other coach in any other job. This is true even though, to some extent, they all approach job-seeking the same way.
LSU is the 11th coaching job Kiffin has had in this century, including his assistant's gigs. It is also almost certainly the job that will break him, because LSU football is the place where insanity goes to get its doctorate. In that sense, it's an ideal fit for Kiffin, who is the perfection of shamelessness before he is anything else. Nothing interests him quite as much as the full-length mirror, and we know this because he is currently leaving the team he has led into the college football tournament to go not recruit players at the new job. He doesn't want to do any of that, and won't have to; LSU knows, as all SEC schools do, that recruiting is done with financial planners rather than position coaches.
There could not be a better or more volatile match of coach and program. Or did we forget that the governor of Louisiana, the supremely loopy Jeff Landry, helped fire the last guy, the finely toxic Brian Kelly, and also the athletic director who hired him, and then tried to wiggle out of Kelly's $53 million buyout before backing down when Kelly lawyered up? Or that Landry soapboxed about the obscenity of coaching contracts more or less until the moment he signed off on Kiffin's shorter deal (seven years) for more money ($90 million plus)? What are these "contradictions" of which you speak, stranger? Everything in college football is transactional, after all, and every long-term relationship is just a gussied-up version of a day-to-day one. It only takes a minute to eat a beignet, and half an hour to want another one; now imagine a sprawling, billion-dollar athletic conference run with that same thought process.
So yeah, LSU is absolutely the place for Lane Kiffin, and Landry is the ideal boss. The pairing pits two towering giants in the narcissism business against each other in a convergence that can only end with the word "pyrospectacular." However and whenever it ends, it will culminate in an epically sky-illuminating assembly, in that oil-refinery-meets-discarded-lit-cigarette kind of way.
Kiffin has fallen before, of course—at Oakland where he was fired by Al Davis using the visual arts equivalent of a butter churn and a horse cart, at USC, where he was fired on the airport tarmac with the school's only regret that the plane wasn't still revving its engines at the time, and at Alabama, where Nick Saban had to kick him out because Kiffin had already taken the resume-repairing job at Florida Atlantic. And each time, he has risen again. Kiffin carries the resilience of someone who is at peace with his place in life, if never satisfied with the literal place in which he finds himself—the charmer whose luster runs concurrently with his wanderlust.
LSU, though, is an entirely different shrimp trap. The state's flagship football program is the most fevered part of a state that routinely takes the powerful and kneecaps them for not understanding the terrain. Eddie DeBartolo lost an NFL team because he goofed around in Louisiana politics, and he's lucky the cost was that small. Ed Orgeron, a true son of the soil, won a national championship at LSU and was fired 21 months later after losing the state's affection for abusing his near-unlimited cultural power (sort of) and losing too many games (mostly).
LSU was among the first schools to recognize that your coach is your coach only until it decides it wants your coach to be their coach. This does not make them special, to be clear, only more brazen. Just like Kiffin.
So let's not chastise the lad for seeking his soulmate, or the school for hiring the human exemplification of everything deranged about itself. LSU and Lane Kiffin are each other, philosophically and psychologically. They can both cite the teachings of the bard Popeye The Sailor, with Kiffin's "I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam," paired with LSU's "If I'm not me, who am I? And If I'm somebody else, why do I look like me?" This relationship is likely to be the ruin of both, naturally, and if you have taken a dim view of the entire Kiffin/Ole Miss/LSU circus, you will agree that's the least they deserve. And if not, they can still be a dandy hate-watch for years to come. That's years as in "two, maybe three." It all depends on when the Cowboys job opens up.
