Lane Kiffin is headed to LSU.
The Ole Miss head coach will imminently announce his decision just one day after beating Mississippi State in the Egg Bowl, and amid a run for the College Football Playoff, according to multiple reports.
It’s the latest move in one of the most chaotic coaching carousels in college football history that, unlike others, has taken place in the middle of the season. Questions have swirled about Kiffin for weeks, as multiple top power conference jobs have opened up at Florida, LSU, and Penn State.
Kiffin’s deal will reportedly pay out more than $90 million over seven years, making him one of the highest-paid coaches in college football. LSU also reportedly offered Kiffin $25 million in guaranteed money for his roster between revenue-sharing funds and outside NIL (name, image, and likeness) dollars. Ole Miss’s counter offer was reportedly similar, but not enough to keep Kiffin in Oxford.
Kiffin himself has been cagey about the decision, declining to directly answer questions about his future at Ole Miss—even saying he was “in the good old days” now with his No. 8 program. Last week, he told Pat McAfee that he did a 6 a.m. yoga class with athletic director Keith Carter, projecting a sense of camaraderie between the two. His daily posts on X of excerpts from The Pivot Year by Brianna Wiest, which offers short, daily nuggets of guidance, began to garner extra attention. (Those tweets stopped abruptly last Friday, after Carter said Kiffin would not announce a decision until after the Egg Bowl.)
But decision day still loomed—and after the Rebels beat Mississippi State 38–19, things got messy.
Saturday night, it appeared that Kiffin had made the decision to take the LSU offer. The big question: Whether the Rebels would allow Kiffin to continue coaching the team through its CFP run even if he had committed to another program.
He met with Carter at the home of Mississippi chancellor Glenn Boyce after the game.
Reports began to surface that Ole Miss wouldn’t allow him to continue coaching; an angry Kiffin threatened to poach both players and coaches if they didn’t let him finish out the season.
On Sunday, LSU reportedly sent planes to Oxford to pick up Kiffin and his family. A team meeting was called for 9 a.m. local time, per multiple reports, and then pushed back minutes before it was set to begin. The meeting will now be held at 1 p.m. local time.
Kiffin has a history of painful exits. Raiders owner Al Davis called him a “professional liar” when he fired Kiffin in 2008; Tennessee students and fans were appalled when he left after a single season; USC notoriously fired him at an airport after his team hit rock bottom in 2013; Nick Saban fired him as offensive coordinator at Alabama before the national championship game in January 2017.
For LSU, the move caps a chaotic month of its own after the Tigers abruptly fired Brian Kelly. The school briefly tried to claim it would fire Kelly for cause, but Kelly sued and LSU admitted it fired him without cause, putting it on the hook for Kelly’s $54 million buyout.
Despite Kelly’s buyout (in addition to the buyout they’re still paying to Kelly’s predecessor Ed Orgeron) the school is prepared to poach arguably the biggest prize in this year’s coaching carousel.
