College Football Teams Can’t Keep Making the Lane Kiffin Mistake

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Hope you made it home safely from your Thanksgiving travels, because I still haven’t—maybe by next week?

Alas, the newsletter must go on, so we’ve got another short edition for you today about why schools should stop hiring Lane Kiffin. Let’s get to it.

Locker Room Links

Lane Change

Lane Kiffin is in the news again. But if he’s doing the same thing he always does, is it really news?

Kiffin is leaving Ole Miss, immediately, for Louisiana State. It’s his sixth head coaching job in 19 years, starting when he was a 31-year-old hotshot hired by Al Davis to coach the NFL’s Raiders in 2007. To be fair, he held the Ole Miss job for six seasons (well, almost), longer than any of his other coaching stints. But he still leaves the football program behind, with maximal drama and a trail of damage in his wake.

So it’s been with every other Kiffin job. He arrives as a savior who will surely bring a wayward program back to title-winning glory. Then there’s drama, some wins, and some losses. He leaves without winning a national title. Rinse and repeat.

What’s less often discussed is how those programs do in his wake. He doesn’t leave behind a legacy of a program that’s been set up for success; he leaves programs struggling to catch back up.

Look at the records after he’s left his previous coaching jobs.

After getting fired by the Raiders, it took the team eight more years to get a winning record (though that probably had more to do with mismanagement by the Davis family). After one mediocre season at Tennessee, Kiffin jumped ship for USC. Vols fans were understandably quite upset. The Volunteers had four more losing seasons and two more coaches before finding more success. After firing Kiffin in the middle of his fourth season at USC, the Trojans bounced back and performed well with interim head coach Clay Helton—but Helton was replaced by Steve Sarkisian, who had one good season before getting fired in his second for showing up to practice drunk. Kiffin then ended up as Alabama’s offensive coordinator for a few seasons, one of them with a national championship. But he was dramatically fired a week before another title game because he had taken on the head coaching job at Florida Atlantic (FAU), which became a distraction while he tried to finish the season out at Alabama (then the Tide lost the championship game). The FAU gig was going pretty well as far as Conference USA teams can do, and at one point Kiffin had a 10-year contract with the Owls. But obviously Kiffin is no longer there—in his third season, he ditched the program before the bowl game to start at Ole Miss. The Owls have only been to one more bowl game since.

Colleges don’t need to do this. They don’t need the drama. They don’t need Kiffin to recruit good players anymore—money can do that. Instead, LSU is currently paying three different head coaches. The school should know better because they have a track record of winning in spite of their coach, not because of them. “The Tigers won national championships with three different, consecutive head coaches — first Nick Saban, then Les Miles, then Ed Orgeron,” sportswriter Rodger Sherman wrote in his newsletter. “That is to say, they won with a genius, a guy who ate grass, and a horny swamp man, respectively.”

My problem is less with Kiffin jumping from school to school than the schools empowering him to do so. Kiffin is just doing what most people would do in normal jobs when they get a higher-paying job offer from a more prestigious institution. That doesn’t mean you have to like what he’s doing, though.

LSU might win a few more games with Kiffin, but then he’ll either flame out or ditch town right when he’s on the precipice.

Maybe the LSU gig will go better than his past jobs. Maybe these poor records are examples of Kiffin overachieving in a situation where no one else could. Maybe Kiffin will stay at LSU for a decade-plus and win multiple championships. Or maybe if Kalen DeBoer gets fired from Alabama next year for losing a mere three games, we’ll be having this whole debate about Kiffin all over again.

Replay of the Week

Most athletes get an assist and then tear their ACL. Kyle Palmieri did it in the opposite order.

NYI announce today Palmieri out 6-8 months due to a left knee ACL tear.

An incredible assist https://t.co/vlm1nef0uq

— Elliotte Friedman (@FriedgeHNIC) November 29, 2025

That’s all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game of the weekend, James Madison against Troy in the Sun Belt Football Championship Game (Friday, 7 p.m., ESPN).