Lane Kiffin doubles down on idea of making Ole Miss a long-term coaching stop

ATLANTA — Coaching carousels are nothing new and in college football it runs at a break-neck speed with some leaving for a new job 12 hours after the season ends. That stigma has been true for Lane Kiffin.

Not all of Kiffin’s stops along his coaching journey were by choice — see that fateful night at the tarmac in California. But for the most part Kiffin has made his way around the collegiate level and even the NFL on his own accord.

When he came from Florida Atlantic to Ole Miss in December 2019 there were many who felt it would be another stop along the path. Coaching at a Southeastern Conference school for a couple seasons would rehabilitate a resume that had wilted some over recent years.

Last month Kiffin was the focus of a USA Today article where he discussed the idea of Oxford being his home for longer than a cup of coffee.

On Monday at Media Days when speaking with local beat reporters he touched on that article and those comments further, cementing that taking up a homestead in Oxford is not a farfetched idea.

“That probably surprised a lot of people with my track record and probably the way that I think,” Kiffin said. “Growing up and young in coaching that’s what I was thinking. I’m assuming the story wrote about me in South Bend and Notre Dame. Driving in there and what I pictured (and) when I was at Tennessee. It’s the same thing at Ole Miss. Smaller places where everyone knows everything about football. Football’s kind of superior to everything else.”

Kiffin is entering his third season at Ole Miss and coming off a 2021 season where the Rebels went to the Sugar Bowl for the first time since 2016.

The wave of excitement and momentum Ole Miss had garnered from last year and reaching a New Year’s Six bowl carried over through the winter. That is due to how Kiffin had early success in the transfer portal, landing one of the top transfer classes in the country.

Add with it the baseball program winning its first national championship in program history, Kiffin is enjoying the mood in Oxford at the moment.

“There’s good and bad to everything. But it’s really neat and when you’re able to have a year of success and see the excitement come out like with our football program and now with our baseball program. It’s neat to see.”

Of course Kiffin’s past will always follow him and the coaching journey he has been on.

Some may find it hard to see Kiffin make Ole Miss a long-term coaching stop similar to a Nick Saban-esque tenure.

Either way, Kiffin is relying on his past of falling from grace at Southern California to becoming an assistant under Saban Alabama then to Florida Atlantic. Acknowledging his past is allowing Kiffin to understand and appreciate his present situation and evaluate how he sees his future possibly going.

“I could be the poster child for that,” Kiffin said of being a coach coming back down from a Power 5 job to a lesser job. “I think what we learn in life we learn from experiences. I refer to obstacles a lot. Things happen that you think are really bad that you don’t know eventually someday why they’re good.

“I’ve said that with the USC situation. Never wanted that or thought that it would be good for me to be fired there but I never would’ve gone to Alabama and learned from Nick Saban. So things happen sometimes that seem like the end of the world and you don’t know what the plan is until way later.”

The roots are taking hold for Kiffin in Oxford it seems. He had gotten a dog, now infamously known as Juice, and has his oldest daughter moving to attend school at Oxford High School this year.