Lane Kiffin confirms his daughter convinced him to turn down Auburn head coaching job in 2022
By Sydney Hunte
Published:
Lane Kiffin was one of the names linked to the vacant Auburn head coaching position in 2022 after Bryan Harsin was let go eight games into his second season. One report after the Iron Bowl that year went on to state that the Ole Miss head coach would accept the job, a report that Kiffin denied before signing an 8-year contract extension with the Rebels reportedly worth $9 million annually.
Kiffin’s oldest daughter, Landry, played a big part in her father’s decision to stay.
On his X account on Tuesday, ESPN’s Ryan McGee posted an excerpt from his E:60 report, “The Many Lives of Lane Kiffin,” set to debut on Wednesday. In it, Landry Kiffin discussed moving to Oxford in 2022 for her last year of high school before attending Ole Miss, and it being “kind of weird” since she hadn’t lived with her father since he joined Nick Saban‘s staff at Alabama in 2014.
“Then we started going on trips and doing a bunch of stuff, and we definitely got a lot closer than we had ever been,” she said.
“I needed Oxford and Ole Miss a lot more than they needed me. But I didn’t know God’s plan,” her father said. “I didn’t know he was going to give me a second chance of being an in-person parent.”
When reports surfaced linking Kiffin to Auburn, Landry recounted making a slideshow with her friends “to a song that we knew he would find sad and like just really rethink his decision.”
Her father was moved to tears after watching it, deciding to remain at Ole Miss.
“Sometimes you need your kids to point some things out to you and just remind you of some things. That was very impactful,” Lane Kiffin said. “I’m not saying I was going. I don’t know that. I was deciding, but that made the decision for me.”
Sydney is an Atlanta-based journalist who has covered everything from SEC and ACC football to MLS, the U.S. men's national soccer team and professional tennis. His work has appeared on such platforms as SB Nation, Cox Media Group and FanSided.
