Lane Kiffin Exit to LSU Creating Chaos at Ole Miss

Lane Kiffin is headed to LSU. 

The Ole Miss head coach made the announcement Sunday, just two days after beating Mississippi State in the Egg Bowl and amid a run for the College Football Playoff. He said he will not coach the Rebels in the CFP, and that the Egg Bowl was his final game at the helm of Ole Miss.

“I was hoping to complete a historic six-season run with this year’s team by leading Ole Miss through the playoffs, capitalizing on the team’s incredible success and their commitment to finish strong, and investing everything into a playoff run with guardrails in place to protect the program in any areas of concern,” Kiffin wrote and posted on social media. “My request to do so was denied by [Ole Miss athletic director] Keith Carter despite the team also asking him to allow me to keep coaching them.” 

The Rebels have promoted defensive coordinator Pete Golding to head coach.

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 counteroffer 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. 6 team in the AP poll (No. 7 in the CFP). Two weeks ago, 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 offer 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 on Saturday at the home of Mississippi chancellor Glenn Boyce after Friday’s 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 announcement was finally made at 1 p.m. local time.

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 poached arguably the biggest prize in this year’s coaching carousel.