It is no secret that Lane Kiffin is on the short list for a lot of head coaching jobs right now. While he was a strong candidate for the Auburn job the year in which they hired Hugh Freeze and has been rumored for jobs in the interim, the cycle is a big inflection point in his coaching career.
Four truly major jobs have opened so far: Auburn, Florida, LSU, and Penn State. All four can win a national title within two or three years of hiring the right coach. And that may not be all the jobs that would want him. FSU still might open despite Mike Norvell finally getting off the ACC schneid, and according to Chris Low on a recent Andy & Ari On3 podcast, Kiffin would’ve been their top choice had Norvell left for the Alabama job.
One school that has an inside track, or at least an incumbency advantage, with Kiffin is the place he’s at now: Ole Miss. If he definitely was staying, he could’ve put pen to paper on an extension by now. Until he does that, he’s in play for other jobs as far as I’m concerned.
He and his agent have a lot of work to do to prioritize all these place that are or might be lining up for his services. Conversely, these big schools with openings need to evaluate Kiffin himself.
Despite his history going so far back, Kiffin is actually fairly hard to pin down as a candidate. His stops are one Rorschach test after another.
The then 31-year-old Kiffin left USC to become the Oakland Raiders head coach in one of Al Davis’s more famous stunts, which is saying something for Al Davis. Kiffin was so young, and that organization was so dysfunctional, and it happened so long ago, I’m not sure anything can be taken from the experience.
Ditto for Kiffin’s one year at Tennessee. He said a lot of things to get people riled up, and his team outperformed expectations in the sense that it lost big games more closely than anyone thought they would. He made some waves with his one recruiting class, but it ended up falling apart in spectacular fashion.
His time as USC’s head coach is his most substantial stop prior to his run at Ole Miss. It also has a big problem for evaluation, which is that it was during the worst of the Reggie Bush NCAA sanctions. The recruiting penalties in particular hit hardest in his final two seasons of 2012 and 2013. They certainly played a role in Kiffin’s ’12 USC team becoming the first since 1963 USC to finish unranked after being the AP Poll’s preseason No. 1.
The offense mostly held up in those years, but the defense really suffered. Among the six losses the 2012 team suffered were 39-36 to Arizona and 62-51 to Oregon. Everyone remembers that Kiffin was fired at the airport after a game, but that game specifically was a 62-41 loss to Arizona State. The whole team, defense included, played much better through the rest of 2013 under interim head coach Ed Orgeron.
So that wasn’t great, but then he entered the Nick Saban career car wash. He did an exemplary job of modernizing the offense in Tuscaloosa. He also did it with the finest players Saban’s recruiting could supply. And despite the Xs and Os success, he wore out his welcome so badly that Saban shoved him out the door between the playoff semifinals and championship game in 2017.
There isn’t much to say about his time at FAU. He won the conference in dominant fashion two-out-of-three years with a down year in between, because it’s FAU and no one can sustain success there without fail.
Then we get to Ole Miss, which is where the biggest question lies.
To hear some folks tell it, Kiffin doesn’t need to leave Ole Miss to win an SEC or national title in this day and age like he would’ve needed to a decade or more ago. The Rebels have plenty of money thanks to the SEC’s TV deals and fan support, so they’re competitive in House settlement revenue sharing and NIL. They spent a ton on last year’s team to try to push a peaking season experience-wise over the top. This year they didn’t go as hard financially, but they went hard enough that the team might actually be better overall (though statistically not nearly as good on defense).
To evaluate Kiffin properly, then, you must answer the question of when Ole Miss became a rough equivalent of the other big boys.
Before that point, you must grade on a curve. Kiffin is easily the program’s best coach since integration, all of which span is relevant history for this kind of frame. However after Ole Miss got to the point of being on par with the Floridas and LSUs of the world, then you have to judge the program by those standards.
Because Kiffin got Ole Miss to No. 11 in the final polls at the end of his second season in 2021, and that is an achievement. Hugh Freeze got the Rebels to No. 9 (Coaches) and No. 10 (AP) in the final polls in 2015, but otherwise you have to go back to the waning years of Johnny Vaught in 1968 to find a poll finish better than that (8th in the AP, though 13th in the Coaches). Kiffin then bested Freeze by finishing No. 9 in both polls in 2023, and he ended up 13th (Coaches) and 11th (AP) in 2024.
The 2021 season was technically the first of the NIL era, but since NIL only became authorized in the first states in the summer of that year and phased in elsewhere, it’s still more like the tail end of the old regulatory regime. The 2022 season was really the first with NIL everywhere, though it took different schools different amounts of time to get their houses in order. Some brief research shows that Ole Miss began a collective in January 2022, but it had to be reorganized in fall of that year under new management before it took off. So for Ole Miss, we can’t say they were on something of even footing with an Auburn or a Florida until 2023.
Kiffin is 29-6 since the beginning of 2023, which are results that most of the blue bloods I’ve mentioned would take since then. The one exception might be Penn State, considering it made the Playoff last year and Ole Miss didn’t, but I digress.
The ’23 Rebels had a good run, capping off the season by beating those Penn State Nittany Lions in the Peach Bowl. Had the 12-team playoff existed that year, they’d have been in as the 11-seed. A nice season, better than a lot of alternatives, but the team wasn’t a real title contender. Ole Miss scored a first-quarter touchdown on Alabama but managed just a field goal the rest of the way in a 24-10 loss to the Tide. In November, Georgia absolutely smoked the Rebels 52-17. Again, this was great by program historical standards, but it’s not good enough to cap out there at a blue blood.
Last year’s team returned much of the talent and loaded up on pricey defensive players. It messed around and gave Kentucky its only SEC win of the year in late September and dropped a game to a good but not great LSU team in overtime in October. The Rebels had their breakthrough win by beating Georgia 28-10 in early November, but then after an open date they blew it at the end to Billy Napier’s Florida. In hindsight, the UGA win is the only thing keeping the campaign from being a complete failure relative to preseason expectations.
This year’s team has played with fire. It fell behind 10-0 to Kentucky before rallying for a 10-point win cut to seven by a meaningless UK field goal at the end, beat by one score an LSU team that’d later fire its coach, and blew a double-digit lead to Oklahoma while John Mateer still had a bad hand before recovering late. It also lost to Georgia again, blowing a 35-26 lead after three quarters to fall 43-35.
With only the Citadel, Florida, and Mississippi State left, they probably finish 10-2 or 11-1 and make the playoff. This team has less raw talent than last year’s did, but it’s winning games that the ’24 Rebels didn’t, such as those against Kentucky and LSU. Not every year can be a peak talent year like 2024 was, so winning gritty games that they didn’t have complete control over is a good sign.
And yet. This team will make the playoff, but I don’t think it’s going to make a deep run unless it draws really favorable seeding. It looks like it’s going to be a repeat of 2023, a team that can beat inferior teams but will fall to the juggernauts.
This all gets back to the central question about Kiffin: can he win a national title at all, and if so, can he do it where he’s at? He certainly has a high floor. However since the year Ole Miss could reasonably claim to be resource-wise on par with the conference’s blue bloods, he’s had two good-but-not-great teams and almost completely fell down with the best on-paper team he’s had there.
That leads me to believe, with the information available, that either he does need to move to a place like Auburn, Florida, or LSU to win a title or it’s just not going to happen at all. Maybe once, in a year when all the pieces line up and luck shines down on him. He doesn’t love recruiting like Saban, Meyer, Muschamp, Napier, or Zook did. It’s less of a concern now with revenue share and NIL, but it’s not completely gone as a factor. He might need the extra tailwind of a brand with more history and cachet than Ole Miss has.
I don’t know what he’ll decide in the end, but if Ole Miss truly is as well resourced as any other SEC football heavy hitters, then his ceiling there very well could be the bottom of the top ten.