Lane Coffin takes over as head coach at LSU

Lane Kiffin announced Sunday that he is leaving his one-loss Ole Miss team to coach at LSU, taking over a Tigers program that has won national titles under three of its past four coaches.

The move, revealed by Kiffin on social media, comes two days after No. 6 Mississippi’s 39-19 win over Mississippi State in the rivals’ annual Egg Bowl game that all but guaranteed the Rebels a playoff berth.

“I was hoping to lead Ole Miss through the playoffs to complete a historic six-season run with this year’s team, capitalizing on the team’s incredible success and their determination to finish strong,” Kiffin wrote, adding that he would maintain “the program’s defenses in any area of ​​safety.”

Kiffin said Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter denied his request “even though the team also asked him to allow me to continue coaching them so they could better maintain their high performance.”

“Unfortunately, that means Friday’s Egg Bowl was my last game coaching the Rebels,” he added.

After Sunday afternoon’s Ole Miss team meeting, players including defensive back TG Banks told reporters waiting outside that defensive coordinator Pete Goulding was now the head coach. Mississippi athletics officials did not immediately confirm the move, but said an announcement was planned for later Sunday.

Two prominent Ole Miss alumni with close ties to the athletic department, speaking on condition of anonymity because no announcement had been made, said they had been informed of Golding’s promotion.

It’s been a strange time for Ole Miss, Kaufman and college football in general. Coffin made his announcement a week before the 12-team College Football Playoff bracket was announced; The Rebels are all but confident of joining after an 11-1 regular season.

Kiffin, considered one of the top offensive coaches in college football, and Carter agreed a week ago to make a decision this weekend. Carter could not afford to wait until after the critical recruiting period in December and transition periods in January had passed before starting his coaching search.

The CFP begins on December 19, with the semi-finals not until January 8-9 and the finals on January 19. Negotiations over the terms of the coffin’s departure dragged on Saturday and Sunday.

Golding took over as the first Ole Miss team to win 11 regular-season games. A former Ole Miss player himself, Golding is in his third season on the Rebels’ staff after serving five years as a top defensive assistant at Alabama under former Crimson Tide coach Nick Saban.

Coffin, meanwhile, was bound for neighboring Louisiana to take on one of the Rebels’ oldest rivals.

It was Kiffin’s success at Ole Miss — where he went 55-19 in six seasons — that made him the target of several major programs looking for a new coach. Coffin was also pursued by Florida, which fired coach Billy Napier a week before LSU cut ties with Brian Kelly.

While LSU offered Kaffen a raise over his current $9 million annual salary, the decision may have been about more than money.

LSU has a championship brand in many sports. modern facilities; A fast, regional fan following; And a legendary, historic home football venue in Tiger Stadium (named after Death Valley), which towers over the Mississippi River and holds 102,000 spectators — 38,000 more than Mississippi’s Vaught-Hemingway Stadium.

The only football coach of LSU’s past four that did not win a national championship was Kelly. He was fired in late October during his fourth season — a seismic development that also prompted then-athletic director Scott Woodward to resign under pressure from Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry.

New athletic director Verge Asbury — a Louisiana native, former Tigers football player and longtime LSU administrator — led a search for a new coach that was primarily focused on Coffin. LSU reportedly offered Kiffin a salary of $90 million over seven years and promised to make sure the football program had enough financial support to pay players.

At Ole Miss, Kiffin split four meetings with Kelly’s Tigers — the home team winning each.

Perhaps more importantly, Kiffin has overseen one of the most successful stints in Ole Miss football history, surpassed only by Johnny Watt, whose 25 seasons at Ole Miss included a six-year stretch from 1957 to 1962, during which his teams went a combined 57-6.

Kelly, who was in the midst of a 10-year contract worth about $100 million at LSU, went 34-14 with the Tigers.

LSU is 247-84 with three national championships since the 2000 season, Nick Saban’s first with the Tigers. Saban won his national title at LSU in the 2003 season and went 48-16 in five years before coaching in the NFL with the Miami Dolphins. Les Miles, hired in 2005, went 114-34 with a national title in 2007. Ed Orgeron, who went 51-20 during the 2016 season with Miles, highlighted by his 15-0, national title-winning campaign in 2019.

Kiffin, the son of the late, long-time NFL and college defensive coach Monte Kiffin, played quarterback in college at Fresno State. He got his first head coaching job at any level in the NFL with the Oakland Raiders in 2007, but he was fired just four games into his second season.

He took his first college head coaching job at Tennessee in 2009 and left after one season to take over at Southern California, where he was fired five games into his fourth season. He returned to coaching in 2017 with Florida Atlantic, spending three seasons there before Ole Miss lured him to Oxford in 2020.

Kiffin has said he adopted the mantra of trying to “do things better before they’ve never been done,” from one of his mentors, Pat Carroll, under whom Kiffin served as an assistant at USC from 2001 to 2006.

No coach has ever won more national championships at LSU. The shroud will be next to try.