Lane Kiffin says sorry now. Well, sort of.
Kiffin has spent a career getting the order mixed up before he talks. He’s always been a Ready-Fire-Aim type of guy.
Changing those last two might help an awful lot. A lot of Ole Miss fans figured that out pretty quick but ignored it as the wins piled up. It’s hard to criticize that.
The new LSU coach sat down with ESPN’s Mark Schlabach at SEC Media Days in Tampa and admitted something a lot of Ole Miss fans figured out months ago.
He wishes he’d handled his goodbye a whole lot better. Well, duh.
Kiffin led Ole Miss to an 11-1 regular season last year. That’s a great record. Then he accepted the job at LSU and things got weird fast.
Instead of walking away clean he spent two days trying to talk Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter into letting him coach the Rebels in their first College Football Playoff appearance anyway.
Carter said no. Kiffin didn’t want that answer. So he did what spoiled brats usually do.
He was even that way to a much lesser extent as a little kid. Lane was just a 2-year-old when he came to Fayetteville, Ark., between my sophomore and junior years with his dad Monte joining first-year coach Lou Holtz.
Kiffin wishes he’d just walked away
“Yeah, I do,” Kiffin told Schlabach when asked point-blank if he regrets it. “But I think that’s a good thing that I look at life that way now, instead of saying, ‘No, I don’t. I was right.’
“I look at things always now, like, how could I have done them better? But it’s also easier when you’re further removed. There’s no emotion involved.”
That’s a pretty honest answer for a guy who usually treats a straight answer like it’s optional.
Kiffin also said he wishes he’d made a cleaner exit the moment Carter shut him down instead of dragging things out. He told Schlabach he should have simply accepted the decision and moved on rather than reopening the subject.
The drama didn’t stop with Kiffin himself either.
His relationship with the Ole Miss program got even rockier when he wouldn’t let some of his assistants who’d already joined him at LSU come back and help coach the Rebels through their playoff run.
Pete Golding ended up finishing the season as Ole Miss’s head coach once Kiffin was gone for good.
This is going to take a few years for Rebels fans to get over being mad about it. College football fans tend to hold grudges for a long time.
Old Arkansas fans still hold a massive grudge against Ole Miss for the 10-7 “leaning field goal” game in Little Rock. Alan Green got two chances at the end to kick a field goal and second attempt, according to people still around that were there, said the kick was wide to the left.
I was there, but 3 years old at the time and don’t have a memory of that because apparently I was more interested in finishing off some popcorn before we had to leave at the end of the game.
Tommy Bell, the official that screwed all that up, then a couple of years later went on to be one of the top officials in the NFL. They were still worked up when Bell passed away in 1986.
A marriage that ended badly
Kiffin also talked about a conversation he had with motivational speaker Kevin Elko after everything went sideways. Elko told him he’d been trying to pull off something that just wasn’t possible.
“[Elko] said that’s really like you’re in a marriage,” Kiffin said. “You’re leaving the marriage that she thought was great. It was great for six years and you’re leaving it in order to go to another woman who she despises. Oh, but let me stay in the house for a couple more weeks with the kids and I might bring some of the kids with me. You’re OK with it right? And then I’m going to leave. And then it’s going to be like, ‘I understand.’ There was no way to do what I was trying to do.”
Kiffin also admitted he wishes he’d handled the actual meeting with Carter differently from the start. All of that maturity the ESPN documentary talked about didn’t show up at the end in Oxford.
“I wish I would have gone in when I met with Keith and said, ‘I’ve made the decision to go,'” Kiffin said. “I wish I would have just said, ‘Hey, I’d like to coach the team,’ and he’d say, ‘No.’ And I’d say, ‘Hey, OK, I appreciate it.’ (I wish I’d) move on (and) never even discussed it again.”
This isn’t exactly a new pattern
If any of this sounds familiar it’s because Kiffin has been here before.
He left Tennessee after a single season in a way that fans there still bring up. His exit from USC ended with him getting fired on an airport tarmac. Even his short run as Alabama’s offensive coordinator wrapped up with some second-guessing about timing.
Regret seems to follow this guy from job to job like a stray cat that won’t stop showing up on the porch.
Somewhere in the SEC this week coaches at Arkansas and Mississippi State were probably nodding along.
Nobody in this league is a stranger to a messy coaching exit. Every team has seen their share too.
But Kiffin admitting it out loud isn’t comfort for Rebel fans.
Some will carry that chip on their shoulder to the bitter end.
Key takeaways
- Kiffin told ESPN he regrets fighting to coach Ole Miss in the playoff after accepting the LSU job
- He said motivational speaker Kevin Elko compared his ask to trying to stay in a house after a bad breakup
- Pete Golding finished the 2025 season as Ole Miss’s head coach once Kiffin departed for LSU
