GLENN GUILBEAU, Tiger Rag Editor
Hollywood South may make a movie about all this.
Call it “An American Cajun Werewolf In Baton Rouge: The Lane Kiffin Story,” with new LSU football coach Lane Kiffin as himself in the starring role, naturally.
Kiffin spent a gut wrenching weekend at Ole Miss over the weekend trying to finalize his decision to become LSU’s new football coach while attempting to convince Ole Miss to let him coach his No. 7 Rebels (11-1, 7-1 SEC) in the College Football Playoff to cap off perhaps their greatest season in history. He also considered staying at Ole Miss, which he built over the last six seasons into its best form of itself since Johnny Vaught was coaching in the 1950s and ’60s.
In the end, that second part about being the head coach at two places at the same time, like something out of “Multiplicity” with Michael Keaton in 1996, didn’t work out.
And as his departure to LSU grew imminent on Sunday, he said he found himself and his son Knox, 17, driving amid rabid fans in a potential road rage incident. That was before Ole Miss fans shot the bird and obscenities from beyond a fence at the Oxford, Mississippi, airport as he and his family and assistant coaches boarded the plane for Baton Rouge.
Frank Wilson will remain LSU’s interim coach through the Tigers’ bowl game, Lane Kiffin just said.
— Glenn Guilbeau (@SportBeatTweet) December 1, 2025
“You’re driving with your son, and you’ve got to turn around,” Kiffin said at his introductory press conference inside Tiger Stadium on Monday afternoon. “These people are screaming at you, trying to run you off the road. I don’t know what they’re going to do. So that affects you. And that airport scene and all the things being said, I understand it. It’s the passion, but they’re saying that about you, and you thought you did a really good job for six years for them. That affects you.”
The Eagle has landed. Good luck to Ole Miss in playoffs without him – four double-digit win seasons in last 5 years at Ole Miss, which had 2 from 1972 through 2020.https://t.co/fcxS52CDdg
— Glenn Guilbeau (@SportBeatTweet) December 1, 2025
Then the Kiffins touched down at Baton Rouge Metro Airport amid gray, foreboding skies, but the way Kiffin would explain it, he may as well have been entering a purple and gold brick road to Oz.
“Even on the plane down here, I’m kind of, like, ‘Man, we made this decision, but I really,'” he said, illustrating that he was having second thoughts.
Former LSU coach Nick Saban had second guessed himself after arriving in Baton Rouge on Nov. 30, 1999, and considered going back to Michigan State. Then-LSU sports information director Herb Vincent said he remembers Saban sitting in a chair in his office with his face in his hands. Saban gradually came around.
But Kiffin instead had an epiphany.
“When I got off that plane, and I saw the Board there (LSU Board of Supervisors members), and I saw the leadership,” Kiffin said. “And I felt the power of this place. Then we get in the car, and as we’re driving out, and there are the fans – just all of them out there at the airport, and their excitement and their passion.”
The trip continued to the football operations building on Skip Bertman Drive and Kiffin spotted Tiger Stadium – the 102,321-seat behemoth the likes of which Kiffin has long envied as Ole Miss’ coach with its 64,038-capacity stadium.
“As we’re going to the office, and you go by Tiger Stadium, and it’s lit up, and you are, like, ‘I absolutely made the right decision,'” Kiffin said. “And it all went away.”
And the crowd of LSU campus and athletic department personnel, donors, fans, mayor Sid Edwards, East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney Hillar Moore and other dignitaries applauded.
“Then you walk in the facility, and myself and the coaches, our general manager, you walk in, and I’m looking around, and I’m, like, ‘It’s like we’re in the NFL,'” Kiffin continued. “Everything is so amazing in that facility, and it’s so powerful. And the national championships and the Heisman Trophies, and the way the whole building is done. You are reminded you are at the elite program in all of college football – the same that those two coaches just told me and reminded me.”
Saban was referencing his two chief mentors – former two-time national champion coach Pete Carroll at USC and former seven-time national champion coach Nick Saban (1 at LSU, 6 at Alabama). With his father, NFL defensive coordinator legend Monte Kiffin, passing away last year, Kiffin has relied on Carroll and Saban. Each advised Kiffin to go to LSU.
But something else happened while Kiffin rode by Tiger Stadium. He transformed into – not a werewolf – but into Cajun Man.
“Actually we were going by Tiger Stadium, and I called one person,” Kiffin said. “I called Ed Orgeron, and I said, ‘Hey, man, this place just makes me want to talk like you right now.’ I did.”
Orgeron, who was the coach of the greatest LSU football team in history in 2019 as the Tigers won the national championship at 15-0 with Heisman Trophy quarterback Joe Burrow, may be joining Kiffin’s staff soon. Orgeron and Kiffin were assistants together under Carroll, and Orgeron was an assistant to Kiffin when he was USC’s head coach from 2010-13 and when he was Tennessee’s head coach in 2009.
Kiffin started talking in a Cajun accent like Orgeron, a native of Larose on Bayou Lafourche.
“We were in the car Sunday, and the kids were in there, and the coaches and the kids are like, ‘What are you doing?’ And I said, I don’t know, I’m channeling Ed right now,” Kiffin said as laughter broke out. “I’m feeling him. I rolled down the window, and I was, like, ‘Geaux Tigers’ to the fans. I called Ed and said, ‘I don’t know, man, I’m feeling you right now.'”
Orgeron answered and made Kiffin feel even better about a decision that tore him up for weeks.
“He’s like, ‘Coach, you’re at the best place in America,'” Kiffin said. “I feel that.”
Tiger Stadium had much to do with Kiffin’s decision as did the surrounding recruiting base – two clear advantages LSU has over Ole Miss, in addition to no other Power 5 program in the state, the Cajun heritage and blackened redfish and all dat. Kiffin even spoke to another Cajun – Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry of St. Martinville.
“I had a unique, great call with Governor Landry, and I could feel his passion and energy in that call for the state of Louisiana and for LSU football,” Kiffin, a native of Lincoln, Nebraska, who moved countless times as the son of a coach.
Kiffin praised “the people who reached out to me through the process,” including former players and “very powerful” LSU alumni.
“This place is different.”
— Glenn Guilbeau (@SportBeatTweet) December 1, 2025
-Lane Kiffin on LSU. pic.twitter.com/Wpk1q7YSEc
“I’m very honored to be the head coach of LSU,” he said. “I can sum it up by saying this. This place is different. Having watched this place for a long time, having been on the other sidelines in this stadium, this place is different. And that’s why we’re here. We have a lot of work to do with that, but I’m very grateful for the opportunity to lead one of the elite programs in all of sports.”
Kiffin kept repeating his “That’s why we’re here” phrase like a stumping politician, as he’s already blending in.
“Someone very close to me reminded me this week in this decision that LSU is the best job in football,” Kiffin said, likely again referencing either Saban or Saban’s and Kiffin’s shared agent, Jimmy Sexton. Saban has often said that LSU’s recruiting base is better than that of Alabama, which has historically had to recruit much more out of state than LSU has had to in order to win big.
“He said, ‘When you take the history, tradition, passion, and the great players in the state of Louisiana, no one can argue that,” Kiffin said. “And when you’re in Tiger Stadium on Saturday night, there is nothing like it.”
Kiffin is at his fifth stop as a college head coach after Tennessee (2009), USC (2010-13), Florida Atlantic (2017-19) and Ole Miss (2020-25). Until this season’s run into the College Football Playoff at Ole Miss, he has never been close to a national championship as a head coach.
“This place is built for championships with championship expectations,” Kiffin said. “We understand that, but as an elite competitor, that’s exactly what you want. And that’s why we’re here.”
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