After absorbing as much attention as he possibly could, college football coach Lane Kiffin has made a decision: He will leave Ole Miss after six seasons and fill the vacancy at LSU. In response to Kiffin's departure, Ole Miss has named defensive coordinator Pete Golding the next head coach. Kiffin shared his official statement Sunday afternoon:
After a lot of prayer and time spent with family, I made the difficult decision to accept the head coaching position at LSU.
I was hoping to complete a historic six season run with this year's team by leading Ole Miss through the playoffs, capitalizing on the team's incredible success and their commitment to finish strong, and investing everything into a playoff run with guardrails in place to protect the program in any areas of concern. My request to do so was denied by Keith Carter despite the team also asking him to allow me to keep coaching them so they could better maintain their high level of performance. Unfortunately, that means Friday's Egg Bowl was my last game coaching the Rebels.
While I am looking forward to a new start with a unique opportunity at LSU, I will forever cherish the incredible six years I spent at Ole Miss and will be rooting hard for the team to complete their mission and bring a championship to Oxford.
Thus ends one of the more excruciating hiring processes in a sport full of them. Take note of Kiffin's swipe at Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter for not permitting him to coach the 11-1 Rebels when they're likely to get their first-ever spot in the College Football Playoff, as if there aren't any bigger reasons why a coach might not be able to stick around once he accepts a job at a conference rival. All Lane has now is his new seven-year contract with a reported annual salary of $12 million. So much for the state governmental anger over reckless spending on college football coaches.
Lane Kiffin to LSU was a possibility once the program fired coach Brian Kelly in October, and became more serious when Kiffin's family flew out to visit Baton Rouge. When LSU's offer leaked, it seemed all but certain that a college football coach would do what college football coaches do, and take the better money at another program. But within the past week, and especially since the minutes following Friday's Egg Bowl victory, Kiffin employment updates reached an absurd frequency. On Saturday night, he was taking a meeting with Carter at university chancellor Glenn Boyce's house. The outcome of last night's Iron Bowl would have potentially given Ole Miss a spot in the SEC title game, so that became a factor. A team meeting originally scheduled for 10 a.m. ET Sunday morning was reportedly bumped to the afternoon, supposedly with a no-phone policy for players. It's hard to pick just one audacious detail from this saga, but Chris Low of On3.com reported a doozy: Kiffin supposedly knew who on his Ole Miss offensive staff he wanted to take with him to LSU, and he told them that if they weren't on the plane to Baton Rouge, they wouldn't have a job. Kiffin, who was once fired by USC at an airport terminal, denied this ultimatum to ESPN.
(Aside from all of that, there was a whole B-plot where, earlier in the week, Ole Miss On3 reporter Ben Garrett described Kiffin's job situation with what he said was a Project Pat lyric—"Can't turn a ho into a housewife, hoes don't act right"—then Kiffin got in Garrett's face after Friday's game. The racial politics of two white guys arguing over the use of "ho" as metaphor cannot be unpacked within one digression of a larger blog, but to me it does provide a pretty good microcosm for college football. Also, that lyric is actually from a song by Ludacris.)
Part of the reason why Kiffin's employment status took on such a Favreian tenor was because of the sport's schedule. The early signing period is now even earlier, before bowl games, the CFP, and the opening of the transfer portal. That means schools need to have their head coach situation settled promptly so as to better recruit players. But a flawed process was exacerbated in this particular situation by Kiffin, a slimy weasel who only slinks out of jobs when he isn't fired from them. Once a failed wunderkind, he rehabilitated his image and worked his way back to a big-time head coaching job. Loyalty doesn't exist in college football, and I'm not arguing otherwise, but Kiffin still wanted to signal as if all of this happened to him without his participation. Just get on the plane already.
