Lane Kiffin Amends His Comments About Racial Background Of Ole Miss

By GLENN GUILBEAU, Tiger Rag Editor

Upon further review, LSU football coach Lane Kiffin tried to clarify his comments regarding the Ole Miss Rebels’ troubled racial image that was a small part of an exploding Vanity Fair article on the former Ole Miss coach published Monday.

It’s Just Different when a cool, non-sports magazine like Vanity Fair profiles a football coach. But then, Lane Kiffin is just different:https://t.co/7C3CoslJCj

— Glenn Guilbeau (@SportBeatTweet) May 11, 2026

“I really apologize if anybody at Ole Miss or in Mississippi was offended by that,” Kiffin told On3.com since the story came out.

If, Lane? Really.

The part of the extended feature by best selling author Chris Smith that went viral on social media among Mississippians follows:

“When he was coaching there, Kiffin says, top recruits would tell him, ‘Hey, coach, we really like you. But my grandparents aren’t letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi,’” Smith writes.

Kiffin, who left Ole Miss to become LSU’s coach after the regular season last year, is then quoted.

“That doesn’t come up when you say Baton Rouge, Louisiana,” Kiffin says in the story. “Parents were sitting here this weekend (at LSU) saying the campus diversity feels so great. It feels like there’s no segregation. And we want that for our kid because that’s the real world.”

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Smith, by the way, will be on Tiger Rag Radio tonight.

Lane Kiffin said this to @On3 regarding his comments to Vanity Fair about differences in recruiting at Ole Miss and LSU.https://t.co/eKntP9qedX https://t.co/INureqdi5S pic.twitter.com/eCNzTC3iqU

— Wilson Alexander (@whalexander_) May 12, 2026

Kiffin explained to On3.com that the above comment was a small part of his interview with Smith in Baton Rouge.

“In a four-hour interview, I was asked a lot of questions on a lot of things. And Ole Miss has been wonderful to me and to my family,” Kiffin said. “I was asked questions about the differences in recruiting, and I said a narrative that we battled there from some out-of-state Black parents and grandparents was not wanting their kid to move to Mississippi. That’s a narrative that coaches have been fighting forever. It wasn’t calculated by bringing it up.”

LSU plays at Ole Miss on Saturday, Sept. 19.