Lane Kiffin shook up the SEC and college football landscape with his decision last fall to leave Mississippi to take over as LSU’s head football coach.
He did so with Mississippi football at the peak of its powers, on the verge of playing in the College Football Playoff with a shot at the first national championship in program history.
Now, months removed from the decision, Kiffin opened up to Vanity Fair about what went into his call to leave a program that he’d built into a power for a rival school — as well as the awkward timing of his decision.
Some of his answers aren’t surprising. Kiffin cited LSU’s “adult money” and willingness to spend to build a winner that gives it an edge in the NIL era.
As for that awkward timing, he fairly pointed to the college football calendar. Due to the timing of the transfer portal and recruiting calendar, LSU needed to have a head coach in place prior to the end of Mississippi’s season. Thus, Kiffin’s decision to leave Mississippi behind came when it needed him most.
‘My grandparents aren’t letting me move to Oxford’
Kiffin also cited a factor that doesn’t come up with almost every coach’s decision to leave one job for another, more lucrative position: diversity. Kiffin told Vanity Fair that he ran into recruiting hurdles at Mississippi that he doesn’t anticipate coming up at LSU.
From the Vanity Fair feature:
When he was coaching there, Kiffin says, top recruits would tell him, “‘Hey, coach, we really like you. But my grandparents aren’t letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi.’
“That doesn’t come up when you say Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Parents were sitting here this weekend saying the campus’ diversity feels so great: ‘It feels like there’s no segregation. And we want that for our kid because that’s the real world.’”
Kiffin didn’t directly cite the inherent challenges to diversity that are engrained at Mississippi. Confederate flags used to be a mainstay in the stands at Mississippi football games until the school indirectly banned them in 1997 with a blanket ban on flagsticks.
Until 2003, the school’s mascot was Colonel Reb, a nod to the state’s Civil War past. The school’s nickname remains “Rebels.” And it still goes by its “Ole Miss” moniker, a nickname with ties to the state’s heritage of slavery.
These are certainly reasons enough for some athletes to take Mississippi off their list. In Baton Rouge, where more than half of the residential population is Black, Kiffin doesn’t anticipate lack of diversity being an issue on the recruiting trail.
