The ultimate Lane Kiffin what-if: Did he leave Ole Miss just before it reaches the pinnacle he's been chasing?
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Lane Kiffin has said many things over the last 15 years about his controversial exit from Tennessee to Southern Cal. But the one thing that has remained consistent is his lack of regret, even though the alternate history where he stays at Tennessee longer than one season almost certainly turns out better than his crash-and-burn in Los Angeles.
"I can't for the rest of my life watch USC on TV and go, 'I turned down that job,'" Kiffin told Sports Illustrated in 2016. "What would it have been like?"
There is little doubt the same what-if impulses drove Kiffin's mindset last season at Ole Miss as the coaching carousel started moving. Intoxicated with the idea of either becoming the second coming of Steve Spurrier at Florida or taking over an LSU program where significantly less talented coaches had won national titles, Kiffin was wired to look at the college football world through the same lens that drove him to USC in 2009.
How can you turn down a job like that?
It was simply not in Kiffin's nature to stay.
But as the fog has lifted since Saturday night, when Kiffin's return to Oxford, Mississippi, produced an epic 32-24 win for Pete Golding-led Ole Miss, we can see things a little more clearly.
There's a good chance Kiffin bet on the wrong horse for the same reason.
As Kiffin deliberated over his exit, his mind was surely consumed with the thought of watching someone else coach LSU to a national title and thinking it should have been him.
He likely never contemplated what it would be like in the opposite direction: What if Kiffin has to watch Trinidad Chambliss and Golding, two people he brought to Ole Miss, lift a trophy he may never win himself?
Kiffin is an elite evaluator of talent, but he's not the best evaluator of situations.
When Kiffin left Tennessee, he did not realize that USC was a different job during the Pete Carroll heyday he remembered. NCAA sanctions were coming, the school's leadership was fraying and recruiting trends were moving away from West Coast schools toward the SEC, which was about to embark on a generational run of championships.
And when Kiffin accepted the LSU job last December and was banished from the Ole Miss facility, he did not account for the possibility that he already had a national championship-caliber team on his hands or that Ole Miss would return in 2026 with the best quarterback in college football and a better chance than LSU to win the title this season.
If Kiffin could have foreseen all that last fall, would he still have left? He would, of course, say yes. But as infrequently as a job with LSU's mystique comes open, a team like the one Kiffin could have had at Ole Miss in 2026 is even more rare.
Maybe it will all work out for Kiffin in the end. With the resources LSU is devoting to football and the all-in support of Gov. Jeff Landry, who seems like the de facto athletic director these days, they are set up to be good for years to come.
But winning a national title is so hard. Everything has to go right, particularly in this 12-team playoff era. And with the universe of teams that can win a championship expanding beyond the traditional powers, Kiffin is at least as likely not to win one at LSU as he is to win one.
That's just math.
Traditionally, yes, LSU is a better bet than Ole Miss. Kiffin is not the first coach who has looked at LSU and thought, "If Ed Orgeron and Les Miles can win national titles there, imagine what I could do."
But the sport doesn't operate the same way now. Ole Miss, like many of the new-age contenders, has big money to spend, as well, and will continue to chip away at the historic ability of the blue-blood programs to stack up an insurmountable depth of talent.
More than ever, you have to catch lightning in the bottle. It is part tragedy, part comedy that Kiffin had already captured some in Chambliss, a former Division II quarterback who was so overlooked in the transfer portal that Kiffin's main competition was Temple.
Now look at him: The Heisman frontrunner (if there is such a thing after three weeks) for a team that already has a couple top-25 wins and, at least right now, looks like it will have a great chance to play in another CFP.
As for LSU? It's facing a game against Texas A&M this weekend that could already put its playoff hopes on the brink of implosion.
That wasn't the plan. And now you wonder if Kiffin didn't fully realize what he was leaving behind.
Kiffin, of course, knew Chambliss was very good. As has been well-chronicled, he believed that after Ole Miss was eliminated from the CFP, he'd make his pitch for Chambliss to transfer and get him a temporary restraining order through the court system for a fifth year of eligibility.
It didn't work out that way, obviously.
But if you unwind how it all went down last fall, those familiar with Kiffin's mentality will tell you he decided he couldn't take the Ole Miss program much further than he already had.
On Oct. 18, the 6-0 Rebels were leading 35-26 at Georgia starting the fourth quarter. They blew the lead, losing 43-35, and you can imagine this inner monologue where Kiffin is telling himself that as well as he'd done to push Ole Miss into the top 10, they were always going to come up just short against the blue bloods. To win it all, you had to be at one of the so-called helmet schools.
There was evidence of that same thinking in some of Kiffin's posts on X last fall about Indiana, where he took shots at their ranking and schedule and suggested they would not be favored over a bunch of SEC teams even though the Hoosiers absolutely would have been favored over nearly all of them.
It probably never occurred to him that Indiana could win a national title last year — or that Ole Miss might do it this year.
Regardless of what happened last Saturday in Mississippi, it's too early to say definitively that Kiffin made a mistake. The season is long, with unpredictable twists and turns ahead.
But if Kiffin had stayed at Ole Miss with the same cast of characters, the narrative right now would be that he's never had a better team or a better shot to win it all.
It's literally what he worked his entire career for. And now somebody else is going to lead that journey while he tries to hang on to playoff hopes against a schedule that includes Texas, Alabama and Tennessee.
We can all look back on what-ifs in how we handle our lives and careers. But Kiffin took the LSU job, just like the USC job, because he was more thrilled by the idea of the next thing than clear-eyed about the reality of the current thing.
Kiffin may not regret going to USC once upon a time. But if Ole Miss and Chambliss win the national title, it will be hard to deny that he made the wrong choice.
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