Lane Kiffin wins at Ole Miss, but without a Playoff, is that enough?
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ATLANTA — It’s talking season, and is anyone in the sport of college football right now better at talking than Lane Kiffin?
From impromptu Paul Finebaum appearances to catfish commentary to Hugh Freeze jabs to heartfelt commentary about what Ole Miss means to him, there’s no one coaching today with Kiffin’s depth, humor, and range. Kiffin’s open-book nature, coupled with a dash of offensive genius, are what make him a compelling character, the type of life is stranger than fiction southerner William Faulkner might have dreamed up, were he privy to the goings on in modern day Oxford.
From Addie and Darl Bundren to Thomas Sutpen and Quentin Compson, Faulkner’s best characters always carried a bit of tragedy with them, and Kiffin’s no different.
How do you miss the College Football Playoff on a team loaded with 5 players taken in Rounds 1-3 of the NFL Draft, including first-rounder Jaxson Dart, a three-year starter and all-SEC quarterback? How do you explain being the first team to dominate Georgia thoroughly on the line of scrimmage this decade but blowing 3 second-half leads, including one at home to a miserable Kentucky team that ultimately won just 4 football games?
Kiffin’s spin on Monday was, as you’d expect, to focus on the positives.
“Where I think of our program, where we are, and the last 4 seasons since COVID, 3 of those 4 seasons we’ve had top-12 finishes,” Kiffin told the media Monday afternoon. “I believe in the last 55 years of Ole Miss there have been 4 top-12 finishes. So, 3 of those in the last 4 years, with 1 in the previous 51 years, says a lot about what we’ve been able to do through the staff, through the players, through everybody involved, especially the leadership above me. Over that time, the third most SEC wins of all 16 teams. That helps us tremendously. When we got to Ole Miss, we had to sell recruits, ‘We’re going to win. We’re going to have first-round draft picks. We’re going to have the most players drafted in school history. We’re going to win 11 games in a season, win 21 in the last two seasons. Now we’ve done that.”
Kiffin isn’t wrong.
Ole Miss, buoyed by Kiffin’s modern offensive mastermind, unprecedented administrative commitment from the university, and an NIL operation that remains one of the best in the country is winning at rates not seen since the pre-SEC integration Johnny Vaught era. In Oxford, where special seasons were few and far between for the last half century, winning 44 games and receiving invitations to 3 premier bowl games in 5 seasons is cause for celebration.
Until it isn’t.
Because for all the fun of the last 2 years, which included wins over rival LSU (in 2023) and Georgia (2024), there are days like what happened in The Swamp last November that beg the question: What’s the ceiling for Lane Kiffin and Ole Miss?
You might be hard-pressed to find an Ole Miss fan willing to admit it, but not since Vaught and the Rebels managed to fumble away a national championship against Bear Bryant’s Joe Namath-less Alabama in the snowy 1964 Sugar Bowl has a lost hit as hard as last November’s face-plant at Florida.
The Gators, fighting for bowl eligibility and led by true freshman DJ Lagway, who played at “75 percent” with a leg and shoulder injury, bested Dart and the Rebels 24-17, all but ending Ole Miss’s chances at advancing to the College Football Playoff and earning an opportunity to play for the national championship for the first time since Vaught’s star-crossed 1963 squad.
Kiffin wins, and, in contrast to the rumor, he wins close games, boasting a record of 12-7 in one possession football games since 2020, the third best mark of SEC football coaches at their current school (Kirby Smart, Eli Drinkwitz).
But Kiffin’s success at Ole Miss isn’t unprecedented, at least not in the 10 years of Rebels football. After all, Hugh Freeze won at Ole Miss too, claiming 19 wins and a Sugar Bowl championship in 2014 and 2015 before losing his job in scandal in the summer of 2017.
And all this brings us back to the question: When will Kiffin’s run of very good, but not great, grow stale in Oxford? Or perhaps more pointedly, when should it, if ever?
Less is expected of the Rebels this season, but Kiffin is now in the awkward position of having raised expectations in Oxford to the point where any substantive drop-off may be viewed as a disappointment rather than a rebuilding aberration. If Ole Miss finishes in the middle of the 16-team SEC, rank-and-file Rebels fans will still love their coach, but will the national perception of Ole Miss as a program on the rise falter and fade?
Kiffin’s well-earned reputation as a roster constructor may offset any precipitous drop-off.
Ole Miss landed multiple big names in the portal, including De’Zhaun Stribling, one of the Big 12’s best receivers a season ago and Kewan Lacy, the talented running back from Mizzou. Princewill Umanmielen (Princely’s brother), arrives from Nebraska, giving the Rebels another outstanding pass rusher to join Suntarine Perkins and Kam Franklin, the highly coveted end who Kiffin and defensive coordinator Pete Golding expect to take a big leap as a sophomore after showing flashes as a true freshman. Luke Hasz, the coveted tight end from Arkansas, also joins the fold, giving new quarterback Austin Simmons a safety blanket.
It might be difficult to match last season’s defensive production, which ranked second in America in scoring defense and a program-best 3rd nationally in SP+ defense, but Golding returns 2 of his top 4 tacklers and has rightly raved about the massive talent in the front 7, which may be more talented than last year’s group holistically despite losing Umanmielen and first-round draft pick Walter Nolen.
In other words, should we expect a drop-off at Ole Miss? Is not expecting one a testament to the way Kiffin has raised the bar in Oxford? Can the answer to all of these questions be “Yes”?
It’s been 6 decades since Ole Miss competed for the national championship or the SEC title and the world has changed, sometimes quickly and sometimes too slowly, in that span.
Lane Kiffin has changed, too, from the brash young son of football royalty to the still brash but jovial, comfortable-in-his-own-skin leader of a storied program he’s modernized and made proud again.
In the soft light of The Grove on an autumn afternoon, where daughters and sons walk with fathers and mothers and slow life down long enough to enjoy it, even for a moment, 9 or 10 or even the occasional 11-win season is probably more than enough.
But the cruelest question in sports is “What if?”
And as Ole Miss moves on from the disappointment of missing the Playoff in 2024, it’s fair to ask “what if” that keeps happening. What then?
Neil Blackmon covers Florida football and the SEC for SaturdayDownSouth.com. An attorney, he is also a member of the Football and Basketball Writers Associations of America. He also coaches basketball.
