For months, Ole Miss players said all the right things about the way last season ended. They kept the focus on the playoff run, on the transition, on moving forward.
There wasn’t much availability to ask what it actually felt like inside the building during the will‑he or won’t‑he stretch of the Lane Kiffin soap opera.
This week, with LSU coming to Oxford for the first time since all of that went down, the curtain finally pulled back a little.
And the answers were honest.
“It was crazy because I was actually deer hunting,” Will Echoles said about the weekend after the Egg Bowl when Kiffin’s departure was formally announced. “I was supposed to go that morning, and then they called a team meeting up here. That’s when they announced (Pete Golding) as the head coach. It was crazy, but it was just a sudden change. Last year, we had our focus set on competing in the playoffs, so it didn’t really affect us for real.”
Players were trying to prepare for the school’s first-ever playoff appearance while also trying to figure out if their head coach was staying, leaving or somewhere in between. They were living in the dark, waiting for clarity that never really came.
“Everybody has their reasons for doing things, but it was a little awkward because we were all in the dark,” Deuce Alexander said. “We didn’t know what was going on. Then one day, he was just gone. I never really understood or knew exactly what happened. But at the end of the day, it is what it is. We’re here now, Coach PG is doing a great job and I’m just ready.”
Awkward is a polite way to put it. Players were dealing with rumors, uncertainty and the reality that LSU was trying to pull some of them into the portal.
“Yeah, there was a little bit of that, but I stayed home,” Alexander said. “I love Oxford. Oxford is home.”
Kewan Lacy didn’t hide it either.
“There was the transfer portal, but I didn’t enter the transfer portal,” Lacy said. “I stayed at Ole Miss.”
He also made it clear that whatever relationship he had with Kiffin is gone.
“I really don’t have a relationship with him,” Lacy said. “I’m just focused on the season.”
Echoles said LSU never tempted him, but the fallout still hit hard in other ways.
“No, I didn’t,” Echoles said. “Honestly, in my mind, I knew this was where I wanted to be. I was already signed here before all of that transpired and all the drama went on, so this is where I wanted to be.
“It was crazy, but it is what it is. What really got to me was when the strength and conditioning staff left, like coach Savage. That was my guy from my freshman year. You spend so much of your time with them in the facility, so that kind of hurt. I didn’t know he was gone until the next day, honestly. That was kind of crazy, but things happen. You just move on.”
That’s the part fans never saw. The playoff push was public. The drama was public. The departure was public.
But the day‑to‑day confusion, the staff turnover, the conversations behind closed doors, the players trying to keep a season on track while everything around them shifted, that stayed hidden.
Until this week.
LSU is coming back to Oxford, and the players who lived through the chaos finally had a chance to say what it was really like. They stayed. They steadied the program. And now they get to play the team that tried to pull them away.
They’ve moved on. But they haven’t forgotten.
