GLENN GUILBEAU, Tiger Rag Editor
College football personnel expert Austin Thomas will be leaving LSU for the third time around a head coaching change.
Thomas, 39, is expected to be named the new general manager at Ole Miss soon, according to a report by Chase Parham of 247sports.com. It will be his second time at Ole Miss, which may be hiring him as general manager after he lost that job at LSU when new LSU coach Lane Kiffin left the Ole Miss head coaching job and brought Ole Miss GM Billy Glasscock and other Rebels’ staff with him to Baton Rouge on Nov. 30.
The fact that Thomas left Kiffin’s football “chief of staff” position after the 2022 and ’23 seasons to return to bitter Ole Miss rival LSU in 2024 may have led to him not being aboard the LSU “Lane Train” this time around.
“Sometimes you’re the windshield. Sometimes you’re the bug,” says the song, “The Bug” by Dire Straits. “Sometimes you’re the Louisville Slugger, baby. Sometimes you’re the ball.”
Thomas has criss-crossed in his career enough to be a bug, or a double agent. He leaves a 7-5 LSU team for which he had much to do with landing the No. 1 Transfer Portal class in 2025, though LSU athletic director Verge Ausberry recently criticized that class for having too many members from losing teams and potentially bad cultures. He will join an Ole Miss team (11-1) that is in its third straight double-digit win season and fourth in five years, while LSU just had its second straight single-digit win season and fourth in six seasons.
No. 6-ranked Ole Miss (11-1) is also in the College Football Playoff, which LSU has not reached since winning it all in 2019.
The Rebels host No. 11 Tulane (11-2) at 2:15 p.m. Saturday on TNT with several members of Kiffin’s former offensive coaching staff – including offensive coordinator and play caller Charlie Weis Jr. – on a brief work release from new jobs at LSU so they can coach the Rebels in the playoffs. The Tigers play in the third-tier Texas Bowl in Houston for the third time since 2015 on Dec. 27 against No. 21 Houston (9-3) at 6:15 p.m. on ESPN.
Thomas previously worked on the “Lane Train” when Kiffin was Tennessee’s head coach in 2009 as a quality control assistant and followed Kiffin to the USC head coaching job as an assistant director of player personnel before the 2010 season. Thomas worked in player personnel at LSU from 2013-15 under coach Les Miles before being named LSU’s general manager in 2016 after gracing a cover of Tiger Rag Magazine in 2015.
After LSU coach Ed Orgeron’s first full season in 2017, though, he moved on to Texas A&M in personnel for the 2018 and ’19 seasons. Then he jumped aboard at Baylor in 2020 with new head coach Dave Aranda, whom he worked with at LSU when Aranda was the Tigers’ defensive coordinator from 2016-19. That lasted one season before he returned to LSU the first time in 2021 as general manager, but Orgeron got fired. And Thomas flipped rivals by jumping back on with Kiffin at Ole Miss after one season with the Tigers.
Along the way, Thomas has been credited in his various bios with excellent recruiting classes at LSU multiple times and at Texas A&M and Ole Miss.
But as the song says, “One day you’re a diamond, and then you’re a stone.”
Thomas, the stone, has landed back at Ole Miss.
Funny, though, an Ole Miss Sports twitter handle called @RebelSportsTalk, which says it is “not directly affiliated” with Ole Miss, said in a tweet Monday that “Ole Miss stole LSU’s General Manager!!”
Never mind that it was reported two weeks ago that Thomas no longer had a job to be stolen from at LSU.
Thomas will join two signees at Ole Miss from early this month who were previously committed to LSU, similar to Thomas. But Kiffin decided he did not want them at LSU on scholarship – wide receiver Kervin Johnson of Tioga High in Tioga and offensive lineman Jalan Chapman of Warren Easton High in New Orleans.
Be the first to comment