By TODD HORNE, Executive Editor
Baton Rouge has been locked in an unusual February deep freeze this year — nights dipping into the 20s, mornings that bite, practice fields rimed with frost.
Death Valley feels more like a walk-in cooler than the usual humid inferno.
But inside the LSU Football Operations Building, the lights flick on before dawn, and the heat is cranked all the way up. That’s where Athletic Director Verge Ausberry says he finds Lane Kiffin every single morning – up and texting him at 4:30 a.m., headed into or at the office already, recruiting calls rolling, film spinning, building what he hopes will be a championship roster.
“I’ve been around a lot of coaches,” Ausberry said recently. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
And remember: Ausberry watched Brian Kelly up close for three-and-a-half seasons. He knows intensity when he sees it.
Kiffin, apparently, is operating on another level entirely.
Seven months.
That’s how long Tiger fans have to wait before Kiffin can win an actual football game in purple and gold. The 2026 opener is still on the distant horizon. Yet barely two months into his tenure, Kiffin has already engineered one of the most dramatic roster overhauls in college football history — and he’s not slowing down.
At his first major press conference since the December introduction, Kiffin stood confident behind the podium and declared that LSU now has “a really talented roster.” He rebuilt it with a transfer portal class he called potentially “the best ever on paper,” one that finished No. 1 nationally after landing two final blue-chip additions in the days after his bold prediction.
“We can’t win the game today,” Kiffin told reporters Wednesday, “but what you can win is the roster and the recruiting. So, yeah, this is what’s supposed to happen. If you go get a staff and pay them what you do, you expect a lot. No different than these players that are sitting here and we go pay a player a lot, we have a lot of expectations for them. They need to produce.”
Fifty-nine new players flooded in. Thirty-four went out the portal door; another 16 headed to the NFL. The turnover was massive, deliberate, and, Kiffin insisted, essential after a 7-6 season that ended with Kelly’s midseason dismissal.
“We don’t have magic dust,” Kiffin said bluntly, addressing early skepticism about the exodus.
“I know at first there was a lot of skepticism about so many players going in the portal, but I just looked at it and was like, ‘OK, what’s my answer to you as the fans and the media, too, if we just kept the same players?’ We are good coaches, I think, but we also don’t have magic dust. We changed a lot because there needed to be changes.”
The marquee additions are unmistakable: Arizona State quarterback Sam Leavitt, Ole Miss edge rusher Princely Umanmielen (whom Kiffin coached in Oxford), and Colorado offensive tackle Jordan Seaton. Depth pieces were scooped up at value prices thanks to what Kiffin calls his staff’s “specialty” — player evaluation — bolstered by LSU’s reported $25–30 million annual commitment through NIL and revenue sharing.
“I just felt that there was a really good plan here in place and an alignment from the top down about how the resources were here,” Kiffin said, explaining why he left “the other place” for Baton Rouge.
But he’s quick to pump the brakes on any premature celebration, gesturing to his notes on the podium as a reminder that everything so far is theoretical.
“We have a really talented roster,” he said. “Does that mean we’re gonna win games? Not necessarily. Does that mean they’re gonna be a great team? No. We have a lot of work to do now.”
That work, of course, starts in the predawn darkness.
Kiffin told his staff Tuesday — and his players Wednesday morning that their lucrative contracts aren’t rewards for past glory.
“Don’t sit around and think you have this salary for this coming year because of what you did before,” he warned them. “This salary is for the work you’re supposed to do. You’re getting paid each month moving forward.”
Classic Kiffin — part motivator, part provocateur, all workaholic. The same restless energy that turned Ole Miss into an 11-win contender is now pouring into LSU’s resurrection, one 4:30 a.m. alarm at a time.
Spring practice arrives next month.
That’s when paper becomes grass, transfers become teammates, and a freezing Baton Rouge finally thaws into football weather.
Until then, Kiffin will keep grinding while the rest of the college football world sleeps.
In a sport where the offseason has become the new battleground, the coach who refuses to rest might just be the one who wins when the lights finally come on in Tiger Stadium.
LSU fans, bundle up. Your new coach is already wide awake — and he’s not hitting snooze.
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