Pat McAfee gave Lane Kiffin some career advice before his big decision to stay at Ole Miss or head to LSU.
The host of ESPN’s The Pat McAfee Show revealed during his program on Friday afternoon why he wanted Kiffin to stay at Ole Miss. With the backdrop of Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the site of Saturday afternoon’s SEC Championship Game between Alabama and Georgia, McAfee explained what his thinking was regarding Kiffin.
Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past 5 days, you know that Kiffin didn’t take McAfee’s advice, instead taking the job at LSU last Sunday. While Kiffin’s Ole Miss team heads to the College Football Playoff on Sunday after its 11-1 regular season, Kiffin himself is getting ready for the 2026 season in Baton Rouge.
McAfee watched it all unfold and wishes it would have had a different ending.
“I still would like to restate that I was publicly and privately telling Lane that he should stay at Ole Miss. Me, personally,” McAfee said. “Just because I knew that there was potential for a lot of heat coming on the other side of it just by reading the tea leaves of the internet. But also having the opportunity to be, I don’t want to say a trailblazer, somebody that builds the place and builds the town.”
After he made his point, McAfee pointed to the man next to him, fellow ESPN analyst Nick Saban, who built the town of Tuscaloosa, so to speak, or at least built it back up to being a national powerhouse after he took the Alabama job in 2007. McAfee believed Kiffin had a chance to leave a “cool legacy” at Ole Miss, like Saban did at Bama, but he decided to head to LSU and start fresh yet again.
Here is McAfee’s full exchange with Saban regarding the Kiffin saga:
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
