It was somewhat surprising because it was somewhat overlooked.
Charlie Weis Jr. getting on the plane from Oxford to Baton Rouge was lost in the shuffle of Lane Kiffin‘s fittingly chaotic exit from Ole Miss. On the surface, an offensive coordinator following a head coach from 1 job to another is commonplace in the sport. On the other hand, an offensive coordinator usually isn’t considered a packaged deal when he has the options that Weis has.
A 32-year-old offensive play caller like Weis has plenty of time to go off on his own to reach his ultimate destination job, wherever that might be. After all, Kiffin was the head coach of the Oakland Raiders when he was Weis’s age. There have likely been plenty of conversations between them about the pros and cons of rising the coaching ranks too quickly.
That’s all well and good. But as Weis’s stock continues to rise, one can’t help but wonder about his loyalty to Kiffin.
Weis has now taken his name out of the running for multiple OC jobs both in the NFL and in college. It’s not necessarily a stunner that a coach who publicly said he wants to stay in the college game turned down the opportunity to be the Eagles’ scapegoat. Er, OC. Same thing.
It’s also not necessarily a stunner that Weis reportedly turned down Billy Napier’s offer to be Florida‘s offensive coordinator before the 2024 season. Even if he was intrigued by the possibility of working with then-freshman DJ Lagway, it wouldn’t have made much sense for Weis to leave a secure role with Kiffin for the same position with the offensive-minded Napier, who was on every hot seat imaginable heading into 2024 before getting fired in 2025.
But the move that slightly surprised me was Weis getting on that plane to Baton Rouge instead of staying in Oxford
Had he done that, he would’ve had full autonomy of the Ole Miss offense with the defensive-minded Pete Golding staying on board as Kiffin’s successor. Don’t think that matters? Don’t forget that Weis’s predecessor, Jeff Lebby, left Kiffin’s staff at Ole Miss for the same position at Oklahoma, where the defensive-minded Brent Venables gave him full autonomy that he parlayed into an SEC head coaching job.
If Weis’s ultimate destination is to become a head coach, it might be easier for him to get that opportunity if he succeeded without Kiffin as opposed to succeeding with him. As we know, it’s Kiffin who gets the majority of the credit when his teams light up scoreboards, not Weis. That’s what made the Ole Miss Playoff run so important for Weis’s future. Without Kiffin, we watched Weis call a masterful game against a well-rested, emerging Georgia defense. If Trinidad Chambliss had only been the byproduct of Kiffin and not Weis, he would’ve collapsed in the Playoff. Next to Fernando Mendoza, no quarterback in the field played better than Chambliss, who also led the best offensive effort of the Playoff against runner-up Miami’s loaded defense (7 of Indiana’s 27 points came on a blocked punt for a touchdown). Weis definitely deserved credit for that.
Some might point to the uncertainty of Chambliss’ future in Oxford as a reason why Weis couldn’t have entertained the opportunity to stay as Ole Miss’s offensive coordinator, as well as the $750,000 bump in annual pay (or more) to leave:
Others would highlight the certainty that Kiffin would have all the resources in play for Weis would give him a higher floor at LSU than Ole Miss. Time will tell if that’s the consensus opinion a year from now, though Kiffin’s portal haul certainly suggests that his play caller will have pieces in place from the jump.
It’ll be a much different feel than 2018 when Kiffin hired the 24-year-old Weis to the vacant OC role at FAU. Weis was the youngest OC in the history of Division I football, which wasn’t lost on Kiffin.
“Age is irrelevant. Experience is relevant,” Kiffin said back in 2018 (H/T ESPN). “I can be 50 years old, and if I’ve only coached for three years, then I’ve only coached for three years. He was this child coaching prodigy. When everyone else was playing in college, he was coaching. He’s coached with Will Muschamp at Florida, at Kansas with his dad, he’s coached at Alabama with Nick Saban, and he’s coached in Atlanta, and he’s coached here. There’s a lot of 40-year-olds that will never be able to say that.
“When you sit in his meetings, if you closed your eyes and just listened — the way he commands a room, the way he commands the players, the other coaches way older than him — you’d never guess he was 25.”
The irony is that Kiffin is now 50, and Weis will be his OC at a 3rd different school. What gets somewhat overlooked was that Kiffin could’ve bailed on Weis after that first season at FAU in 2018. That year, FAU went 5-7 with an offense that regressed by 9.5 points per game. Perhaps Kiffin’s own experiences as a young coach who once got a quick hook was what prevented him from bailing on Weis. A more cynical person would suggest that Kiffin just didn’t want to admit that he was wrong for hiring such a young offensive play caller who, prior to FAU, had never had an on-field role. Either way, Kiffin and Weis were both rewarded in 2019 with an FAU offense that vaulted back into the top 15 in FBS in scoring.
But it’s not as if that 2-year stretch made them a packaged deal after that season. When Kiffin got the Ole Miss job at the end of 2019, it was Lebby who became his first OC while Weis went to the other coast of the Sunshine State to become the OC at USF. After Lebby made that aforementioned move to Oklahoma, Kiffin reunited with Weis, who made the smart decision to get off Jeff Scott’s sinking ship in Tampa. Hiring Weis was again somewhat bold by Kiffin, considering that USF’s offense played a significant part in a 3-18 (1-14 vs. AAC) mark in 2 seasons with Weis.
Is Weis’s loyalty tied to Kiffin showing faith in him at 3 pivotal points in his young career?
One can assume that, and since those 3 pivotal points, Weis rewarded Kiffin with 4 top-30 scoring offenses. At this point, Kiffin is well past needing to sell to others on why Weis should be his play caller. And if there were any scattered skeptics somehow remaining at LSU, all they had to do was turn on Ole Miss in its Playoff run, which ended 20 seconds short of a trip to the College Football Playoff National Championship Game.
What’s different now is that Kiffin and Weis are both at LSU, which is not a place where any sort of disappointing on-field result is “somewhat overlooked.” That’s not to say Weis will automatically fall into the scapegoat role that he might’ve feared he would’ve been signing up for with the Eagles. It is, however, a reminder that Kiffin’s leashes with his assistants figure to be shorter than ever. There’s risk in that for Weis.
It’s possible that Weis can defy the odds and become the first Kiffin assistant to leave his staff directly for a Power Conference head coaching job. On second thought, Golding just pulled off that feat, but only because he opted not to get on that plane and follow Kiffin to Baton Rouge. Golding decided that after 8 years as a defensive play caller for Nick Saban and Kiffin, he was ready to take on that challenge of running his own program. After all, SEC head coaching jobs might come open more often than most, but they’re still highly coveted.
That type of vacancy might be the only thing that’ll get Weis to leave Kiffin. That could also come in the form of a coveted non-SEC job like Clemson, Florida State or Kiffin’s old stomping grounds, USC. What seems inevitable is that Weis will become a head coach — in college or in the NFL — well before his father did at age 49. The Notre Dame job, ironically enough, went to the elder Weis after he also spent 8 years as an offensive coordinator. Of course, those were NFL coordinator jobs, which were also preceded by 2 decades of additional sideline experience. It’s the type of experience that Weis Jr. was able to bypass thanks in large part to Kiffin.
At his 4th different offensive coordinator stop, Weis will become one of the most intriguing non-head coaches to follow in the sport. You could argue he was as intriguing as anyone during Ole Miss’s unprecedented Playoff run. That spotlight only grew as he juggled 2 jobs. It won’t fade in his most scrutinized role to date. Will it lead to him getting fired by Kiffin for the first time? We don’t know that. Will it lead to him becoming the youngest Power Conference coach in the sport? We don’t know that, either.
Weis boarded that plane to Baton Rouge at the end of a weekend that’ll live in college football lore forever. He was fortunate enough to etch his name in college football lore for what he did without Kiffin in the weeks that followed. In time, his legacy will be defined by what he does away from the watchful eye of Kiffin.
For now, though, the 1-2 punch that took flight to Baton Rouge has another job to do together.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
