“Sometimes we just troll too, you know, sometimes just to mess with people.” —Lane Kiffin on The Pivot
What do you think of when you see the name Lane Kiffin? Tarmacs? Tennessee? Mattresses ablaze, little fires in the street? Do you see a clipboard, spinning in the air? Do you see obscenities, painted on The Rock? Have you been watching college football long enough that you see a goatee? It was wispy in his early coaching days. Not a powergoat like Mike Woodson’s. It didn’t have that kind of heft. But it was there. And it was saying something. It was saying, “Hey, I’m trying, OK? I’m doing stuff. I’m an adult and I’m making an effort. At least you know I have self-confidence because look at my face. Look what I think I can pull off.”
Confidence has always been one of Kiffin’s strengths. Confidence, play calling, and posting. As a play caller, he is a man of minimal conscience. As a poster, he’s a little stinker. A natural. He posts from the hip and the heart. He posts and posts and posts. Click one of his Instagram Stories at the wrong time and you’re going to see way too many of those little bars at the top of the screen. He asks important questions. He gets deep.
Kiffin’s been part of the American football landscape for a long time. He comes by it honestly. His father, Monte, is the creator of the Tampa 2 defense and one of the most consequential minds in modern football history. And Monte took the kid to work. Lane grew up in locker rooms, on the sidelines, watching pros play and dad coach. In college, he was a backup quarterback at Fresno State, and later worked as a graduate assistant for the Bulldogs. After that, there were stops with Colorado State and the Jacksonville Jaguars. Then, in 2001, Pete Carroll gave Lil’ Kiffin a gig coaching tight ends at the University of Southern California. The job would change his life. That was Carroll’s first season as the head coach at USC, before the program went to the moon. Kiffin was on that rocket ship. The offense setting records, Reggie Bush doing donuts up and down the Pac-10, defenders being twisted into abstract pretzels. Matt Leinart’s ballroom dancing, Will Ferrell’s training Ryan Kalil, Captain Compete’s competing. These were the glory days of SC football, back when Bill Withers would show up to a team meeting and tell the entire squad to start wearing knee-high shower shoes to protect against “a fungus we haven’t seen in a long time.” It was infecting locker rooms from sea to shining sea. Said Withers, who really should have acted more: “It’s the only fungus I know associated with any bone damage.”
Kiffin is doing his own kind of damage these days. He’s now at Ole Miss, coaching a 9-1 team that’s seventh in the College Football Playoff rankings. His Rebels beat LSU by five points, Oklahoma by eight. He’s gone from wunderkind to pariah to almost the apex of his profession, and is being linked to every imaginable opening in this cycle: Florida, LSU, Penn State, even the New York Giants. His offense is averaging just shy of 500 yards a game. He’s not just beating teams; he’s twisting the knife.
The route to this point has been circuitous, full of faceplants. It has also been wildly entertaining. Kiffin, like Carroll, is an entertainer at heart. If he’s involved, one way or another, it’ll be a show.
This is a man with three massive flameouts to his name. He knows his way around a messy public canning and has, more than once, been the face of the classic workplace genre: worst firing stories. There was his Raiders exit in 2008. Just a year before, he had been named the youngest head coach in modern NFL history, the supposed John Madden for a new generation. Then he went 4-12 and opened the next season 1-3. Even Shane Lechler couldn’t save him. Al Davis wore one of the coolest jackets I’ve ever seen and read a letter he sent to Kiffin. It is one of the weirder letters I’ve heard, and Big Al read it aloud, at a press conference, with the words displayed behind him via an overhead projector. There are many gems throughout. Things like, “Rob played your Cover 2 defense and we got killed.” Things like Al trying to say the word “veteran.” And the pièce de résistance: “I realize that you did not want to draft JaMarcus Russell. He is a great player. Get over it.”
Then there was Kiffin’s Tennessee exit in 2010. After coaching the Vols for one season, going 7-6 with a loss in the Chick-fil-A Bowl, he bolted for Los Angeles when USC chose him to be Carroll’s replacement. Kiffin called it a dream job, the only one that would’ve compelled him to leave. He’d made a name for himself during SC’s heyday, after all, and now the school wanted him back as head honcho. He couldn’t say no. On the night the news of his departure leaked, Tennessee students poured angrily into the streets, their mattresses burning orange. It got ugly. Per Chris Low: Kiffin “barricaded himself in his office at the complex before he could finally be escorted by police to his home in Knoxville sometime around 4 a.m.” He left town still owing the Western Plaza Barbershop $14 for a haircut. At least he was around long enough to do this.
And then there was Kiffin’s most memorable ousting, his firing from USC in 2013. LAX, 3 a.m. Middle of the season, SC just got waxed by Arizona. When the plane landed, he was taken into a little room just off the tarmac and fired. When it was over, the team buses left without him, taking all of Kiffin’s stuff. He was alone and unemployed at the airport. And not in the fun way like Tom Hanks was. At least Navorski had access to lobster ravioli and a nice job in construction. No chance Kiffin got to do anything cool like ride through an X-ray machine or hang with Pagoda. He would have given anything to hang with Pagoda. So would any one of us. Pagoda’s got a great, chill presence and elevates every space he enters. You feel him before you see him. If nothing else, he would’ve been on the ball enough to tell Kiffin to grab his suitcase before he got off the plane.
And here is our turning point. The spot in the movie where the main character realizes the error of his ways, has an epiphany, and matures. In a 2023 ESPN oral history of the night he left Tennessee for USC, Kiffin said:
“I had a very large ego. Kids who are given too much, too early sometimes—you see it in actors all the time. Sometimes you’re not ready for all that. I wasn’t ready at 31 to be the head coach of the Raiders, 32 at Tennessee, 33 or 34 at USC. I wasn’t ready for all that fame and that money. Some of that is my fault. And I think there’s also the factor of being really young, you leave Tennessee so you have part of the country that hates you and is pissed off at you. It’s human nature that there’s some jealousy from guys going, ‘He’s this age, and he’s got this and he’s got that and got a really attractive wife.’ I know there was a lot of that. People want you to fail. That’s America.”
In 2014, Nick Saban hired Kiffin to be his offensive coordinator at Alabama. Kiffin and Saban, they weren’t night and day, but they might have been night and man who believed that the sun could reach the next level if it would simply listen to him. That if the sun worked hard enough, it could stop itself from setting. These men are very different. If they both take a trip to the beach, Kiffin lounges on the sand rereading The Secret; Saban spars with tiger sharks and makes seahorses do the Oklahoma drill. You bet there was tension. Because Kiffin’s relationship to authority is tenuous and abstract. Saban’s relationship to authority is I am it and it is me, I am the all-knowing. It was never going to last forever.
When it was great, it was great; their differences came off as nitro Odd Couple tête-à-têtes, young buck and old bull, only when you take the pebble from my hand will you truly achieve, and so on. When it was bad, there were ass-chewings. Booming, furious ass-chewings, where you thought Saban might rip off his headset and chuck it at Kiffin’s face. Saban refused to hold the bus for Kiffin and would leave if he wasn’t on time. In a January 2018 interview with Dan Le Batard, Kiffin said this of his time at Alabama:
Le Batard: What percentage of the days did you go in miserable?
Kiffin: Well, there’s 365 and you play 14 so, whatever that—351 days. Yeah. I like game day.
Despite that, they won a national title together after the 2015 season, behind a team with pristine vibes and a running back you could confuse for a souped-up supertractor. Near the end of the next season, though, Kiffin took the head coaching job at Florida Atlantic. His timing could have been better. He accepted the gig in the weeks leading up to Bama’s appearance in the playoff. Shockingly, Saban found this to be a distraction. After initially agreeing that Kiffin would stay on and keep coaching, Saban ultimately fired him, and Alabama went on to lose to Clemson in the natty.
FAU is where Kiffin’s renaissance became reality. He was there when the word “peace” first started appearing in interviews, when he found the version of himself that seems to exist now. The school structured damn near its entire brand around him, so much so that there was an actual Lane Train. Crucially, this is also when his social media presence took flight. He got into Bitmoji when he was at Bama, but FAU is where he stopped hiding his inner shitposter and embraced being college football’s preeminent troll. He thrived. FAU experienced success like never before. In Kiffin’s debut season, the Owls went to a bowl game for the first time in nine years and set a school record for wins. In his final season there, FAU won 11 games. The program cratered when he left. It has 11 wins over the past three seasons.
Since then, Kiffin’s ascent has only continued. He won 10 games at Ole Miss in 2021, 11 in 2023, and 10 again in 2024. He had eight players, including Jaxson Dart, taken in the 2025 NFL draft. He beat LSU after his daughter announced that she was dating one of the Tigers’ linebackers days before the game. Afterward, Lane talked his shit.
If Kiffin was boring his career would still be interesting. Rise fast, fall hard, get back up. Classic Disney Channel original movie. As it is, though, he’s a rabble-rouser, sassy and playful and strange. You know, a little stinker. This is one of the most prolific posters of our time. A titan on the keys and one of the five most recognizable coaches in the sport. Look at this satisfied smirk.
Yeah, Kiffin likes the mic. Is that a crime? You know who else liked the mic? Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King Jr., and that Stanford fan who kept screaming “Heisman” at Christian McCaffrey after the 2016 Rose Bowl. That’s good company.
Kiffin’s coaching loose lately and he’s been a menace. He’s eating salad and going for it on fourth-and-short inside his own 25. The Rebels will get the first down. Later in the game, they will do it again. I think it’s cool that you can just tell when a coach has used the nail polish emoji. You know, the one where it’s like you’re putting it on? I mean this as a massive compliment.
There was a proposal on the field during Ole Miss’s 49-0 win over The Citadel last Saturday. Kiffin strolled over to the happy couple and posed for a picture. When asked about it after the game, Kiffin said, “I didn’t know I’d be part of that but things happen here in the Sip.”
This is the type of thing you say when you’re the most successful football coach in school history, when you have taken it from a middle-of-the-road SEC squad to a top-10 team in the country. Kiffin’s at a point in his career where his affection for the camera, his penchant for dramatics, and his desire for messiness are no longer knocks against him. Get old enough and bugs become features. They get grandfathered in as part of an endearing package. He’s Chip Kelly’s offensive mind mixed with KD’s Twitter account mixed with Fierce by Abercrombie & Fitch mixed with an old Stormie Omartian devotional your mom keeps near the toilet. The combo’s working.
Is Kiffin the spiritual successor to Steve Spurrier? Let’s pump the brakes. There will never be another Spurrier, even if Kiffin has been open about how influential the Ole Ball Coach was for him and Florida newspapers are throwing around terms like Spurrier 2.0. Still, they both have an affinity for stirring the pot, for finding drama, for making the joke. Kiffin knows this about himself. From former USC sports and information director Tim Tessalone, in that oral history of the tarmac incident: “We were talking one time and he goes, ‘You know my nickname when I was a kid, right?’ I said no. He goes, ‘It was Helicopter. Because when I was a kid, I would walk into a room and just stir everything up.’”
Spurrier is funnier than Kiffin, but the effort’s there. Kiffin is on record saying Spurrier is the reason he wears a visor; that is a very good reason, for which I give him many points. Spurrier is in the Visor Hall of Fame. They let him keep an office in the accompanying museum and everyone calls him Sugar. Look at him. There is so much pain and suffering and destruction in the world. I often wonder what’s the point of anything. What future awaits my daughters when they are grown? Will we still be a country? I don’t know. What I do know is that this is beautiful.
Kiffin does not have the Spurrier swagger. He’s not giving us any moment as rad as the OBC lording over fountain drinks at Arby’s. This is no slight to Kiffin. Spurrier set an impossible standard. You go toe-to-toe with him in anything involving charisma and you make peace with silver and be proud you did your best. But even if Kiffin is not the spiritual successor to Spurrier, he’s operating in the same genre. He scratches a similar itch. Some people like football coaches who lock themselves in dark rooms looking for every little edge. Others like football coaches who toss alley-oops to their players on the sidelines. Takes all kinds.
Kiffin is not for everyone, but everyone seems to want him. He’s currently the betting favorite to be the next head coach at both LSU and Florida, who Ole Miss plays on Saturday. The speculation is so loud that people are out here making fools of themselves and getting duped by scam accounts. Even five years ago, it would seem nuts for a coach to turn down LSU or Florida to stay at Ole Miss. But this sport moves fast. With the state of college football being what it is—NIL, transfer portal, megaconferences, 12-team playoff—it doesn’t feel as essential as it used to for a coach to work at a blueblood if he wants a chance at winning a title.
Earlier this fall, ESPN and Ryan McGee dropped a documentary called The Many Lives of Lane Kiffin. It opens with Kiffin, tarp off, letting the triceps out to play. Coach is doing hot yoga. Has to do it every day. Non-negotiable. He’s pink, he’s lean, and he looks like a ham. A sunburnt and broasted phoenix with a passion for posting and sweating it out.
At the end of the doc, Kiffin is presented with a choice: stay at Ole Miss or go be the head football coach at Auburn. Kiffin had lived by himself for so long—the entire time he was at Bama, the entire time he was at FAU. His family missed him and he missed them. Since he’s moved to Oxford, one of his daughters started college at Ole Miss, his son moved there to go to high school, and his ex-wife reconciled with him and got an apartment in town. He chose to stay in Oxford.
But it is 2025 and everything must have a sequel. After all that, it would be wild for Kiffin to pick up one year later and head somewhere else. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen, though. Anything is possible. Sometimes, you just have to mess with people.
