OXFORD, Miss. — Rising over Lane Kiffin’s right shoulder, tilted against his office wall, the giant picture of Kobe Bryant is unmistakable.
Bryant’s gaze pierces through the image, and above him, scrawled across a black backdrop, written in white lettering, is a message so fitting that it almost feels staged.
Block Out The Noise, Stay Focused.
From the other side of his desk, Kiffin explains that he added the picture to his office after what happened last year, when a late-season stumble cost his Ole Miss program a playoff spot.
At this very moment, Kiffin would like to avoid speaking about the irony of Kobe’s message — how his team, the Rebels, are preparing to play a program, Florida, in the midst of a head coaching search that seems squarely focused on him.
It’s no real secret. In fact, Kiffin addressed the issue with his team a couple weeks ago and has proceeded to discuss it when asked in public interviews. On this day, an unseasonably cold but sun-splashed November Tuesday in north Mississippi, Kiffin politely declines to talk specifics about his future.
He’d prefer to keep the focus on two things: his current team — at 9-1, a dang good one — and the wild family ride on which he finds himself. For the first time in more than a decade, he’s back living in the same town with most of his children and even his ex-wife.
But Kiffin is not like any other coach you’ve probably ever met.
In a time of great sensitivity here, where tensions are high and anxiety lingers — will he stay? will he go? — Kiffin isn’t scurrying into a bunker or disappearing down a hole. He is, after all, Lane — brutally honest, unabashedly open and heartedly welcoming to a reporter for an interview within his office, where, mid-discussion, he reminds himself aloud about “the job thing we’re not going to talk about,” he says with a smile, before, talking about it, at least for a bit.
But there really isn’t much to say, Kiffin says.
He has never been happier or felt better about his life than he does right now.
He hasn’t drank in nearly five years, rarely eats red meat, never eats bread, works out every single morning, watches his son throw touchdowns as a local high school quarterback and attends sorority events for his daughter at the school at which he coaches — all in a wholly unexpected place for a man who’s always craved the bright city lights and sunny beach communities.
“It’s like this movie, an amazing movie,” he says. “What you thought you wanted and what you always pictured may not be what you eventually want when we get older and we change. We think this is, ‘We want more action and the city and things to do!’ Well, maybe it just all came together here.”
‘He can build a legacy’
Professionally, Kiffin is in Year 6 of a masterful construction of a football program using a blueprint — an aggressive NIL-backed transfer portal recruitment — that’s now been replicated across the country.
In fact, the Ole Miss Rebels are one victory away from hitting double-digit wins for the third consecutive season.
That’s never been done here before.
“Our hope is to finish this season really strong and hold on to him for a long time here,” says athletic director Keith Carter. “He can build a legacy here that he might not have the opportunity to do at other places.”
Perhaps that is true.
Maybe Kiffin will remain here and choose against joining a historic powerhouse in this very league (LSU is open too). Maybe he’ll continue here serving as the architect of the rise of Ole Miss football (53 wins in fewer than six full seasons). Maybe he’ll settle into Oxford for the long haul and transform this place into the football power it was in the 1950s and 60s under Johnny Vaught, have a statue built of him, a street named in his honor.
Maybe.
So far, despite what Carter describes as “constant dialogue” with Kiffin and his representatives, the coach hasn’t yet committed to doing all of that — pushing aside, for now, any kind of new contractual agreement with the school to focus on what’s at hand: No. 7 Ole Miss vs. Florida on Saturday night at Vaught Hemingway Stadium.
The opponent, the 3-6 Gators, not only represents the school that seems most attracted to Kiffin. Florida is the team that upset Ole Miss last November, 24-17, costing the Rebels a trip to the playoff.
No one here has forgotten that.
“Last year, we were just, like, so confident. We just looked past them. ‘We’re already in the playoff!’” says Cayden Lee, a junior receiver. “At the time, I don’t think their record was the best either. We were thinking about who the [playoff] matchup can be, are we going to play this team and that. We went into the game and got punched in the mouth.”
The Rebels got into an unexpected “dogfight” against Florida, Lee says. A lot of other things happened during the game too, Kiffin says. Ole Miss lost its top receiver and safety to injuries, played without its starting running back and a banged-up quarterback too, and a dropped touchdown pass could have been the difference.
Kiffin is on high alert.
The “blue-blood programs” like Florida will almost always have “really good players regardless of their record,” he says. “People point to the Kentucky game [UF lost 38-7], but the week before, they’re beating Georgia in the fourth quarter.”
A win on Saturday against Florida all but assures Ole Miss a playoff spot. The Rebels have a bye before playing at 5-5 Mississippi State on Nov. 28 — a win that could secure a home first-round playoff game.
Punching a playoff ticket complicates matters.
The hiring cycle this year, already historic by buyout standards and blue-blood openings, is made even more complex by an expanded playoff and leading coaching candidates, like Kiffin, whose team may be playing deep into December or January.
Will schools wait on their top target?
Will those top targets wait on the playoffs?
A poll of more than a dozen sitting athletic directors and industry insiders generates mixed results.
“I don’t see how you can wait,” says one.
“Oh, they will wait,” says a sitting power league athletic director. “You know they’re going to have something [an agreement] done in a drawer somewhere.”
In fact, a few administrators compare the new college football hiring cycle to the one in college basketball, where it’s quite common for universities to wait for a team’s run in the NCAA tournament to end.
But, says another, “It’s tricky. Can you wait even if you have a handshake deal? Do you trust that enough?”
How much NIL?
Despite the playoff implications, Saturday’s game against the Gators isn’t necessarily the thing on everyone’s mind here.
Kiffin knows that. This year, he is approaching this job situation differently to avoid what happened not just last season but in 2022 as well, when the Rebels lost the final three games of the regular season as Auburn courted him during a coaching search that, only after Kiffin declined, landed on Hugh Freeze.
Kiffin’s different approach? Be open about the job stuff with the media and, more importantly, his own team. A couple of weeks ago, in an address to his players, he compared his situation to how players are courted by other schools in this open-transfer era of college athletics.
“Saturday night after games they get [offers]. I’m not telling any secrets,” he says. “I think that resonated with them: ‘Oh, it’s happening to him what happens to us.’”
The bidding war for Kiffin, compared to his players, is a bit more pricey.
Already top 10 in salary at $9 million, Kiffin, whether through Ole Miss, Florida or another school, is very likely to break into the top five, if not higher, with a price tag exceeding $11 million annually.
But is money the most important thing? Two weeks ago, Kiffin said he’s never made a decision based on money nor “do I care about it” — something that makes his agent, Jimmy Sexton, “really mad,” he says with a laugh.
More important to him, he says, is the financial commitment to the roster in an age of athlete compensation. A program’s facilities, historic success, brand value or even geographic recruiting footprint are no longer the most important factors to taking a job.
While those are still part of the decision, most coaches want to know one thing above all: How much above-the-cap, third-party NIL can a school generate for the roster?
That answer changes if the industry’s new enforcement entity, the College Sports Commission, operates as intended — eliminating most booster-backed and third-party cash to athletes deemed to be phony. If enforcement works, money will be more even, equalizing roster budgets across the country and providing a level of competitive equity similar, Kiffin says, to the NFL.
Already, the freedom of player movement has made college football jobs more even than ever before. For instance, five years ago, would coaches at Indiana and SMU re-sign with those programs, as they did this year, despite interest from blue bloods like Florida, Penn State and Auburn?
Suddenly, Ole Miss can build a championship-caliber program just the same, or very similar, to those longtime powerhouses.
“It’s already changed,” Kiffin says. “Now, the top teams can’t collect [all the great talent like they used to]. They can’t collect them all because people can move and not sit.
“You’ll still have the advantage of blue bloods and traditions and why a kid chooses,” he continues. “If the money is all the same, those are still going to win out because, a lot of times, it’s close to where they are living. That still matters — your recruiting base.”
But will the money be all the same? In just its fifth month of operation and with just seven total employees, the College Sports Commission’s enforcement capabilities remain unclear.
The situation is made more murky by the continued absence of a “participation agreement” that all power conference schools intend to sign. The document, essential to the CSC’s enforcement efforts and for now not finalized, would prevent universities from filing legal challenges against the CSC and requires schools to follow NCAA and House settlement rules, not their state laws.
In short: Kiffin and coaches, potentially in the market for other jobs, can’t get a real answer to that question — how much money can you generate in NIL?
“I don’t know if the cap is going to really work,” says Kiffin. “It sounds like a good plan, but what’s going to happen when players start suing saying, ‘You shouldn’t be limiting what we make!’”
Is this the ‘final chapter’?
As he leans back in his office chair, Kiffin points to another determining factor in any job: quality of life. He says he’s more happy right now than he’s been in years — or ever.
His son, Knox, moved here with ex-wife Layla over the summer, started school at Oxford High School and is now leading the Chargers into the playoffs as a sophomore starting quarterback. His oldest daughter, Landry, is a junior at Ole Miss — and the reason that he dismissed the Auburn job three years ago, to remain here with her.
There’s more. This place changed him physically, too.
About five years ago, in a medical checkup, doctors warned Kiffin about his declining health. He was overweight, drank too much and ate poorly. At age 45, they were close to starting him on a second blood pressure medication when, suddenly, he changed.
No red meat. No alcohol. No bread. No dessert. And daily hot yoga sessions each morning.
Still to this day, he’s stuck to most of it.
He got “addicted” to it all, he says. He saw the benefits. His mind wasn’t as cloudy. Relationships with people improved. He got better at his job — just look at his record since.
He did it for his kids, sure. And his father, Monte, and mother, Robin.
But he did for himself as well.
“If the No. 1 reason you make major changes in your life is not for you, you will revert back,” he says. “But I knew my dad wasn’t going to be around forever. I was like, ‘How great would it be for my dad — and my mom too — at the end to see the best version of his son, because he was my biggest fan, even when I wasn’t great off the field.”
Over the last two years, his parents passed away.
“The last few years, he was like, ‘Man, I am so proud of you,’” Lane says.
Since his mental and physical transformation, Lane says God has given him “little winks” to keep going. Wins in football? Sure, those count. But Landry and Knox moving to Oxford were the biggest of them.
Sometimes, it all feels like a dream.
Is this real? Is this a movie?
He asked himself those questions last Friday from the sideline of an Oxford High football game.
“It’s been amazing,” Lane says. “You haven’t had Knox in like 12 years. You haven’t been in the same city as him. I’m watching him play and there’s so many things that’s a dream.
“You know, we could be the best team in the history of Ole Miss football, record wise, and they could be the best team in the history of Oxford High School? He’s throwing touchdowns. There’s Landry watching the game with me on the sideline. She’s cheering him on. I’m like, ‘You didn’t have any of this and now look.’”
There’s a feature film playing out in Oxford, a true redemption tale, a stunning and unexpected rise of a football program and a once-troubled man, all happening in this tiny town in north Mississippi.
It’s a mystery thriller, a suspenseful theatrical performance, with a cliffhanger that’s left us all waiting, with bated breath, for its leading star, its marquee headliner, to storm the stage for his most consequential scene.
What will Lane do?
“I grew up picturing I’d be at one of the elite blue bloods where you can sign top-five classes every year because of your in-state talent and facilities and tradition,” Kiffin says. “I wasn’t raised to think it was a program like Ole Miss, but I’ve also changed a lot over the years. I didn’t grow up thinking this was the final chapter of the story.
“Maybe it is.”
