Lane Kiffin played himself one more time

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The best coach Ole Miss has had since integration lost to his own creation on Saturday night. It was both a total repudiation of Lane Kiffin and a demonstration of why LSU committed $91 million to him and put a roughly $50 million roster around him. Sorry, Lane. And well done, Lane! 

Ole Miss’ 32-24 win over Kiffin’s Tigers was a singular moment of sports catharsis. It was a perfect college football experience for Rebels fans and a pretty good one even for casuals with no Ole Miss ties. It was also a testament to the program Kiffin built in Oxford, one that still bears his hallmarks even after he left last November and tried to take everything in the pantry with him on his way to Baton Rouge. 

This will not be the decisive chapter of Kiffin’s bolt from Ole Miss. The move may still age well in the history books. But it is proof that Kiffin created something so durable that it remains formidable despite his best efforts to take it apart. Kiffin was such a transformational head coach at Ole Miss that he really did turn one of the SEC’s football backwaters into one of the best jobs in the country, with a lot of help from his now-former friends. He just wasn’t so good at it that he could rip it apart when he left. 

No coach in the sport has a more documented history of making problems for himself. In the old days, Kiffin did it by being immature. His track record of self-sabotage is traceable at least to his run with the Raiders in 2007 and  ’08, when he had real offensive ideas but no idea how to orbit around someone else (owner Al Davis) who called the shots. At Tennessee in 2009, he got himself a vaunted reprimand from the SEC for making unprovable allegations about Urban Meyer’s recruiting practices, racked up minor NCAA violations himself, and cemented his villain status by leaving for USC after one year. He was unpleasant enough in Southern California that his firing a few years later came on an airport tarmac. He rehabbed his image under Nick Saban at Alabama but was still enough of a vector for drama and distraction that Saban dismissed him amid a playoff run while Kiffin prepared to take over at FAU, sullying a nice legacy in Tuscaloosa. Kiffin’s whole thing has boiled down to, one, calling ball plays, and two, being insufferable. 

Kiffin maintained a troll’s spirit at Ole Miss and said a dumb thing or six, but the main problem he made for himself in Oxford was coaching football too well. The combination of Kiffin building a good team and Ole Miss getting the ability to pay players a lot of money (now an amount very close to LSU’s, just behind the SEC’s money leaders) has likely raised the floor for Pete Golding and every Ole Miss coach who will come after him. Kiffin’s program-building and Ole Miss’ accumulation of financial muscle fed off each other. It’s easier to win with a pricey roster and easier to motivate donors when they can see what money can buy. 

Now, what that money has bought Ole Miss is a legitimate peer in an SEC race where every program is chasing Georgia’s consistency. Kiffin pulled a handful of good players out of Oxford on his way to Baton Rouge, but he missed on the most important two, quarterback Trinidad Chambliss and tailback Kewan Lacy. (It was not for a lack of trying on Kiffin’s part.) Ole Miss was suddenly both wealthy enough and nurturing a good enough program culture that Golding and his new staff kept Kiffin’s top targets and were able to surround them with valuable reinforcements. Ole Miss had a moment kind of like this once before: Tommy Tuberville left for Auburn in 1999, lost his first game against the Rebels, and then went 7-2 against them the rest of his time there as Auburn became a title contender and Ole Miss wandered the football desert. Whatever Kiffin does at LSU, the Ole Miss program he left behind will not go back into the tank––not now that enough people with checkbooks have gotten a taste of the top. 

There’s around a 50/50 chance that Kiffin lifts a national championship trophy before he leaves LSU. But his pursuit of that glory has already cost him one very real, non-theoretical playoff run. Golding led that one instead of him last winter, as Ole Miss got to within a whisker of the title game. Now, the strength of the program he left behind has left Kiffin with an early loss in his first year in his new job. That’s a second playoff run that’s now at least in jeopardy because of either Kiffin’s excellence at Ole Miss or his lack of comfort seeing it through. Kiffin has lots of adversaries, and one of them is still in his mirror.

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