What is Lane Kiffin chasing?

As Lane Kiffin torpedoes a historic season, it's worth asking what he's actual seeking

Photo Credit: Ole Miss Athletics

Twenty-nine days ago, Lane Kiffin beamed as he sat in front of a microphone in the bowels of Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, moments after his Ole Miss team cemented a 34-26 road win against Oklahoma that positioned the Rebels as surefire favorites to make the College Football Playoff.

The grin was coaxed by his own joke about hating the idea that he’s aging, the quip was prompted by a question about a moment Kiffin had on the field after the game in which he chucked his visor in the air in front of a euphoric crowd of Ole Miss fans in the visitor’s section. Kiffin then yelled something unintelligible that created an entire industry’s worth of message board interpreters.

“I don’t like to say I am getting older,” Kiffin said. “Like I told [the team] last night, ‘as I get older, I want to tell you things that I didn’t do, things that I hope you do differently.’”

After the visor hurl, Kiffin apparently called for his team to come out of the locker room and back out onto the field to soak in the moment.

“Just enjoy the moment. These things are hard to do,” Kiffin said. “I didn’t really have a plan. I just told them to go back out there and say thanks to the fans. But also to enjoy the moment. You are at an iconic stadium against a program that has won a million games here. Take in this moment instead of always trying to get to the next thing — which is kind of what I did my whole life. So, I just try to help them with that.”

It was a poignant moment for Kiffin, who had just led Ole Miss to its most consequential road win in a decade. It was also the latest track on an album of Kiffin’s creation.

One month prior to this scene, ESPN’s Ryan McGee released a (very well-done) documentary as part of ESPN’s E60 series titled “The Many Lives of Lane Kiffin”. The widely-viewed film detailed Kiffin’s almost inverted journey as a coach — from being the head coach of the Oakland Raiders at 31 years old, to being fired by USC at age 38, his enrollment in the Nick Saban School of Coaches Rehabilitation, rebuilding his career at Florida Atlantic and returning to the spotlight at Ole Miss — as well as his maturation as a man and a father. The film was in lockstep with a consistent and calculated message Kiffin has emitted over the last three years — that he’s a changed man who has found peace and contentment in his life, as he’s matured through failure.

Now, four weeks later after that moment in Norman, Ole Miss sits at 10-1 on the precipice of the program’s first ever College Football Playoff Berth. But his words ring hollow and his actions don’t match his words. Kiffin has turned a historic season for the Rebels into a sideshow, an ego-fueled circus to satisfy his unquenchable thirst for attention.

“Take in this moment instead of always trying to get to the next thing — which is kind of what I did my whole life. So, I just try to help them with that,” said the man who sent his family to Gainesville and Baton Rouge this week, days after Ole Miss beat Florida to get to 10-1 on the season.

“I want to tell you things that I didn’t do, things that I hope you do differently,’” said the man whose career has been built on a foundation of chaos and messy break-ups. The same man who, just three years ago, torpedoed the end of Ole Miss’ 2022 season because Auburn courted him for its head coaching vacancy.

After a week of the incredibly cringeworthy interviews, hypocritical quotes and cryptic morning devotionals on Twitter designed to stoke conversation to fuel his insatiable appetite to be desired, the incredibly-aloof Kiffin is showing everyone that his perceived metamorphosis as a man comes with caveats, because when it comes to his inability to appreciate the current place he resides in and the people that comprise it, he’s the same person he was 16 years ago when he left Tennessee in messy fashion. He’s the same person that he was 12 years ago when he was fired as USC’s head coach on a tarmac at Los Angeles International Airport after a road loss to Arizona State to fall to 1-3 on the season. The same person who, when he finally did get another head coaching opportunity at Florida Atlantic, couldn’t behave professionally for Alabama and Nick Saban — the man who gave him his first opportunity to rehabilitate his image and career — long enough to remain the offensive coordinator through the Crimson Tide’s national championship run in 2016.

As a decision on his future looms and his chaos-driven circus churns on, it’s worth asking a handful of questions. How did we get here? What happens next?

And perhaps above all else: what is Lane Kiffin actually chasing?

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The beginning of a strange but productive marriage

On December 8, 2019, a chilly Sunday evening, Lane Kiffin stepped off a University jet at the University-Oxford Airport to a sea of fans gathered on the tarmac. The next day there was a press conference inside the Pavilion, at which Kiffin promised to compete for championships. People drank beer on a Monday and celebrated a hire designed to “make a splash” by Keith Carter’s own admission. At that moment, Ole Miss was a desperate program starving to win again. Desperation often increases the appetite for risk. Carter and Ole Miss took one in hiring Kiffin because it meant accepting his grating, self-centered personality and checkered past. It was an odd marriage, but one that ultimately made sense due to their mutual desperation to win at the highest level.

In terms of on-field results, throughout the entire six-year marriage, both sides have delivered on promises. Kiffin has won at an unprecedented clip. Since Kiffin’s hiring, Ole Miss has won more games than any program in the SEC not named Alabama or Georgia. Kiffin went 10-2 in 2021, earned a Sugar Bowl berth and expedited Ole Miss’ return to prominence. After the 2021 season, the Florida and LSU jobs opened. Kiffin wasn’t considered a serious candidate for either vacancy — mostly due to that aforementioned grating personality and checkered past, the very same traits that Ole Miss was willing to deal with — but that doesn’t mean Kiffin wasn’t interested. He would’ve crawled across glass for either job, mostly because Kiffin has always viewed himself as better than Ole Miss, despite the Rebels giving him the opportunity and resources to revive his image and career — and yes, I know Arkansas was a suitor for Kiffin in 2021, but look at their administration (Hunter Yurachek, yikes), how it has handled NIL and its schedules over the last six years and tell me with a straight face that Twitter-Man Kiffin would’ve had the same level of prosperity.

2022 was a pivotal moment of growth for Kiffin, Ole Miss

The success of the 2021 season, coupled with Kiffin acting like a remotely normal human for 24 months and, at least publicly, not looking for the next exit ramp, brought with it other suitors. Ole Miss started the 2022 season 8-1. On November 12, Kiffin blew a 10-point lead to Alabama at home for the team’s second loss of the season — a gut-wrenching defeat to a man, Nick Saban, Kiffin became obsessed with beating in his early years in Oxford. Thirteen days prior to this loss, Auburn fired Bryan Harsin.

Seemingly unable to get over the Alabama defeat, the emotionally and socially-handicapped Kiffin decided that flirting with becoming Auburn’s next head coach — a program that’s proven to be utterly dysfunctional and fading toward irrelevance in the NIL era — was more important than the final two games of Ole Miss’ 2022 season. The temporary dopamine hit Kiffin got from someone new to flirt with took priority over on-field results and his current job. Despite Kiffin begging the public to believe he’s somehow changed and matured, the same tired, chaotic saga is predictably unfolding again.

The Rebels got boat-raced at Arkansas that next week and then lost at home to a Mississippi State team it had no business losing to, and limped to an 8-5 finish. After a melodramatic and eventful Thanksgiving week that now looks tame in comparison to this current saga he’s stirred, Kiffin elected to stay at Ole Miss and not go work for a former Mississippi State baseball coach/AD Jon Cohen, who fell upward into the Auburn AD job and basically described NIL as unsustainable, similar to the tech idiots in the 1990s who described the internet as a fad. Despite Kiffin’s melodramatic bullshit that left the program in limbo, Ole Miss welcomed him back with open arms.

The 2022 Auburn saga ignited the Ole Miss fanbase. Donations to the Grove Collective — an entity that’s been on the cutting edge of this new frontier of college athletics — flooded in. Ole Miss put its money where its mouth was and invested like a big-time program. Kiffin deserves credit for holding Ole Miss’ feet to the proverbial fire in terms of investing in the program at a top-of-the-SEC level. But is hardly the sole reason for the rise of Ole Miss’ football program.

The Ole Miss administration and its fans deserve a lot of credit for positioning the Rebels to thrive in this modern era, not just in football, but in all sports. The work of Keith Carter, William Liston, Walker Jones, Denson Hollis, Zach Scruggs and so many others in founding the Grove Collective, structuring it properly to ensure its long-term prosperity and continuing to adapt to an unprecedented era of college sports, is the single biggest driving force of the rise of the football program, despite Kiffin getting the lion’s share of the credit. Kiffin is the single biggest beneficiary of the Ole Miss administration operating more shrewdly than the rest of the country since July 1, 2021, when NIL became permissible. He’s also benefited from a ridiculously light schedule the past two seasons.

Kiffin is a really good football coach. And to his ever-lasting credit, he’s mostly capitalized on the infrastructure and resources Ole Miss has given him. An Egg Bowl win on Friday would mark 50 wins in five years. That doesn’t happen without Kiffin. It also doesn’t happen without the aforementioned alignment and innovation from the Ole Miss administration. One side seemingly understands and appreciates that. Kiffin does not.

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Real expectations came in 2024, and Kiffin shrank

Seemingly validated as a program after fending off Auburn — a program traditionally viewed as higher in the SEC pecking order prior to this NIL era that fans and media members alike struggle to calibrate their expectations to — Ole Miss capitalized on the momentum of Kiffin staying and went 11-2 in 2023, beat Penn State in the Peach Bowl and then put together the best transfer portal class in college football that offseason to set up a 2024 season that was unprecedented in terms of expectations. Ole Miss was a preseason top-10 team and, on paper, was a favorite to make the newly-expanded College Football Playoff.

Kiffin proceeded to lose at home, as three-score favorites, to a Kentucky team that went 4-8 (1-7), then lost to a mediocre LSU team in a game in which Ole Miss trailed for zero seconds, and capped off the gag job by again losing as double-digit favorites to an average Florida team (as the Rebels came off a bye week!) and squandered a golden opportunity to make the College Football Playoff. Not to mention, Kiffin spent half the season gaslighting the fanbase about the nonsensical usage of running backs, which culminated in the loss to Florida in which Ole Miss ran the football 35 times and only 10 carries went to players who were listed as a running back on the official roster.

The only person to blame for Ole Miss’ failure to make the 2024 College Football Playoff is Lane Kiffin, unless of course you ask Lane Kiffin, who is seemingly allergic to any form of accountability or introspection.

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The surprising success of the 2025 season has inconvenienced Kiffin

Simply put, one of the many reasons this situation has devolved into a farce is simply due to how this 2025 Ole Miss team has defied any sort of realistic preseason expectation.

Think about what the discussion was surrounding this team in July. Austin Simmons, a prodigy of his father’s creation, was the heir-apparent to Jaxson Dart. Despite having an even more favorable schedule than 2024, one that included eight home games, this was viewed as a transition year for Ole Miss as it ushered in a young, talented new quarterback and developed other younger players at other positions on the roster. No one in their right mind could have possibly predicted that Simmons would play seven quarters of football this year and that Ole Miss would ride a former Division II quarterback to a 10-1 record.

In a normal world, we’d be lauding this as Kiffin’s best coaching job since he’s been in Oxford — which it is.

But why aren’t we doing that? Is it perhaps because the head coach himself never believed this to be possible? And now that this impossibility has become a reality, the selfish and aloof enigma that is Lane Kiffin would rather wash his hands of a team, a program and a school that has answered the call at every turn, rather than see it through? His behavior certainly seems to suggest that.

That is perhaps the most damning portion of this entire saga. Kiffin didn’t think Ole Miss would be here, and now that Ole Miss is on the verge of being one of 12 teams capable of competing for a national championship, Kiffin can’t as easily move on to the perceived greener pastures he’s spent the last three years telling all of you he no longer views as greener.

This is what Ole Miss signed up for when it hired Kiffin

This is what you sign up for when you hire Lane Kiffin. Despite his self-serving media tour begging you to believe he’s a different person, this is who he his and who he has always been. When Kiffin flirted with Auburn in 2022, I wrote a story declaring that Ole Miss is paying the Lane Kiffin Tax. Ole Miss is still paying that tax today as its 10-1 regular season becomes secondary to Kiffin’s ego and addiction to attention.

The Lane Kiffin tax is the nomadic existence that is his entire career. Ole Miss is his longest career stop. This is a man that seemingly thrives on chaos. It’s the Twitter persona not matching his actual personality. It’s the inability to show any form of appreciation to the people and place in which he currently resides. Again, despite what he’s begging the public to believe, his behavior shows he’s the same man. Kiffin didn’t get fired on a tarmac at LAX solely because of a loss to Arizona State to fall to 1-3, he got left on a tarmac because USC was tired of dealing with Lane Kiffin, the grating personality, the narcissism and aloofness that has bubbled to the surface over the last week in Oxford.

Kiffin thought that he could coach this Ole Miss team through the playoff without committing to the program, and then leave for an in-conference foe and everything would be sunshine and roses. He thinks Ole Miss should be thankful for every hour and second he graces its program with his presence, you, the Ole Miss fan, are simply incapable of understanding the genius of a 47-year-old man who spent the night before Thanksgiving in 2022 trolling all of you and tweeting his dog. The fact that Kiffin thought he could coach in the Playoff and then leave underscores the remarkable aloofness and inability to understand social cues and perception that’s troubled him his entire career.

Once he made this obvious discovery, he made a hilariously tone deaf attempt to do his version of damage control. On Tuesday morning, Kiffin appeared on the Pat McAfee show. The 20-minute interview was inauthentic and difficult to watch.

“It was great to get that Saturday night SEC win. Our crowd and our fans were electric,” said the man who, just four days prior, when asked about the crowd at the Florida game being a Blue Blood-like environment, used the moment to take a shot at the fanbase by responding “were you here last week?” referring to the fact that Ole Miss did not have a sellout for a noon kick against the Citadel.

McAfee is a wildly successful modern media figure. He is not a journalist and would likely happily admit that. The decision for Kiffin to go on that show, where he knows he won’t get pressed on anything at all, was calculated. McAfee would welcome the Unabomber on his show to tell his side of the story on mailboxes and technology if it meant more views for his show.

Then, the next day, on Wednesday, Kiffin had his appearance on the weekly SEC coaches teleconference, where he was peppered with questions by actual reporters, which led to several awkward exchanges.

“I’m saying the same thing for six years. I’m not talking about speaking on other jobs. I’m focused on this one,” said a man two days removed from sending members of his family to Baton Rouge and Gainesville.

“Somehow it got spun really negatively. I said it before. If programs want your coach, okay, that should be looked at as an amazing thing and a great thing by your fans. So programs want your coach because you’re 10-1 and whatever. We’ve run three 10-win seasons in a row, which has never been done in Ole Miss before,” Kiffin said. “Is that a good thing that other programs want your coach because your program’s experienced success it’s never had? Or would you rather be 5-6 or 6-5 or something right now and no one wants your coach? I would look at it from that perspective.”

You hear that, you, the Ole Miss fan? It’s a good thing that your head coach won’t commit to remaining with the program that’s 10-1 with a chance to win a National Title. You should shut up and enjoy it while the head coach figures out the best way to leave a place he sees as beneath him.

Again, this is what Ole Miss signed up for when it hired Lane Kiffin. He’s a man who has made a career of being a nomad and has refused to show any appreciation to his current employer. That’s all fine, but it’s more difficult to digest when the man you hired feigns a newfound sense of appreciation for his life and the opportunity he’s been given, only to torpedo the best season in modern history the moment someone else shows him attention.

Think about the absurdity of all of this for a second: the week of the Florida game, Kiffin granted an interview to Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger — who, for my money, is the most talented writer and reporter currently covering college football — who wrote a story last week titled “College football’s most-coveted coach has found a home at Ole Miss. But is Oxford enough for Lane Kiffin?”

In the story, Kiffin called his life “like a movie”. Six days later, after beating Florida, he sent his family to Gainesville and Baton Rouge to explore a new future. Kiffin will piss on your head and tell you it’s raining, and you’ll like it, too, because he’s better than Ole Miss and better than all of you.

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Kiffin now has a decision to make: Am I willing to be a villain again?

Continuing the embarrassing behavior that made the last week such a vapid cry for attention, as Ole Miss entered a bye week before it goes to Starkville for the most consequential Egg Bowl in Ole Miss history, what did Kiffin do? He called his recruiting staff off the road to return to Ole Miss for a previously unplanned Friday practice that left coaches and players in a state of confusion, multiple sources confirmed to Rippee Writes.

After the bizarre, unscheduled practice entering an otherwise routine bye week, Kiffin met with Athletics Director Keith Carter on Friday. I have no idea what happened in that meeting but it led to Carter, who is a smart man, and a shrewd operator, to put out this bizarre statement that Kiffin’s future will be decided after the Egg Bowl.

Again, think about the absurdity of all of this: entering a bye week before Ole Miss goes to Starkville to cement a playoff berth and cap off the best regular season in modern history, the AD had to put out a statement about the head coach’s future and asked everyone not to lose sight of what is most important — winning the game and punching a ticket to compete for a national title. The irony in all of this is that the only person who lost sight of this abundantly obvious fact is the head coach.

According to multiple sources, the parting message Kiffin left his team with on Friday before entering the bye week was to eliminate “any distractions.” One can only wonder how that message resonated with his locker room as they spent the weekend opening social media and turning on their TV to discussions regarding Kiffin’s future.

After last Saturday’s win over Florida, Kiffin was asked about his future at Ole Miss.

“To even talk about it would be so disrespectful to our players and how they played today,” said the man who spent the week doing damage control after sending his family to scope out his potential future. Which is more disrespectful? Turning a 10-1 season the players have spent the last nine months working their asses off in favor of more attention to the supposed adult running the program, or is it more disrespectful to honestly answer a question in a press conference? The world may never know.

So, what is to be made of all of this? This is purely my opinion, but I believe Lane Kiffin wants to be the next head coach at LSU. I think the unexpected success of the 2025 season has inconvenienced this desire and he’s currently grappling with this question: will he actually leave a playoff team to take another job, in the same conference, and is a bitter rival?

To say that it would be an unpopular decision would be an understatement. The fact that he seemingly doesn’t want to be at Ole Miss and is willing to tank a chance at competing for a national championship is bewildering. Trying to understand the enigma that is Kiffin leads to the final question I asked.

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What is Lane Kiffin actually chasing?

Ole Miss has given Kiffin every possible tool he’s asked for to win at a high level. Since Kiffin’s arrival in Oxford, the rules and economics of college football have changed. Hell, Ole Miss is perhaps the best example of the change in college football over the last four years.

Due to NIL and the transfer portal, Blue Blood programs can no longer hoard talent, like Saban did in the peak of the Alabama dynasty. Top-level prospects aren’t going to wait multiple years to get onto the field at Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State or wherever else, when they can go get paid elsewhere and get on the field immediately. The average margin of victory in SEC games has essentially been cut in half over the last eight years, and has shrunk by nearly six points since NIL became legal. That’s not a coincidence, it’s a data-backed trend.

In this modern era where parity reigns supreme, what matters most? Fan investment in terms of consistent NIL, administration alignment, elite coaching and talent evaluation. Ole Miss checks all of those boxes. Are there built-in advantages at the traditional blue blood jobs like LSU and Florida? Sure, but those intangible and unquantifiable advantages seem to be less important in this modern era.

Is he chasing winning at the highest level? Because leaving a playoff team to go start over somewhere else is the antithesis of wanting to win at the highest level.

Is he chasing a traditional blue blood job? Maybe. But the short-sighted nature of that line of thinking is that whatever program he romanticizes that isn’t Ole Miss will put up with the bizarre, narcissistic bullshit that comes with hiring Lane Kiffin. Imagine Kiffin being 4-3 in year three at LSU and tweeting a photo of Mike the Tiger laying in his cage with some fortune cookie-like quote about blocking out distractions. I am sure that will go over very well.

Is he chasing the ability to be loved and appreciated as himself? Ole Miss has allowed Kiffin to be weird, selfish and has stroked his ego at all costs. Hell, the man bought a dog and it became the de facto mascot of the school. The assumption that Kiffin’s idiosyncrasies and grating personality would be as accepted elsewhere is silly.

Perhaps he’s chasing something that doesn’t exist. Lane Kiffin might be perpetually longing for the next thing he doesn’t have.

Or, maybe, he’s not chasing anything at all. Maybe he’s trying to out-run his own insecurities as a coach — the ones that squandered a national title-level roster in 2024.

Maybe he’s trying to outrun the version of himself that he’s spent the last three years telling the public he’s left in the past. Maybe Lane Kiffin is chasing a version of himself he’s not capable of becoming.