This is Lane Kiffin’s best coaching job ever … and it’ll inevitably end in a raise
Published:
I threw out the stat last week in an attempt to remind everyone who needed to be reminded why Lane Kiffin wasn’t a Tier 1 coach in college football. On the heels of Kiffin’s Ole Miss squad blowing a 2-possession lead in the 4th quarter at Georgia, I brought up that in true road games vs. AP Top 25 teams, he fell to 1-10 during his time in Oxford. That lone win was at Tulane in 2023, which meant that after the Georgia loss, Kiffin was still searching for his first true road win vs. a ranked Power Conference foe at Ole Miss. It wasn’t that I had an anti-Kiffin agenda. He’s the best coach in program history. I did, however, think that context was worth referencing.
And then 7 days later, Kiffin shut me and David Stone up by going into No. 13 Oklahoma and handing the Sooners their first home loss in over a year.
Stone was the Oklahoma defensive lineman who was caught in the crosshairs of a confident Kiffin in the postgame interview with ESPN’s Molly McGrath. According to Kiffin, Stone had been doing a lot of talking to the Ole Miss sideline during the game, and on live television afterwards, that came to light in fittingly Kiffin fashion.
Had Kiffin known (or cared) about the stat that I brought up as the “yeah, but” with his impressive, but imperfect Ole Miss résumé, you can bet that type of energy would’ve been directed my way, too. Either way, Kiffin’s 2025 mantra has felt like one that late Oklahoma fan/country music sensation Toby Keith belted out many a time during his multi-decade, chart-topping career.
“How do you like me now?!?!?”
Now, I like that I can’t reference that stat with Kiffin anymore. Instead, there’s something I’ll start saying about him that’s a bit less quantifiable and a bit more about what my eyes have told me during this “how do you like me now” season.
We’re watching Kiffin’s best coaching job of his storied career. Of course it’s happening in the midst of him being considered the top candidate for big-time vacancies like Florida and LSU (more on that in a second).
The Trinidad Chambliss element alone feels like the obvious argument this being the best coaching job of Kiffin’s career. Unless you were extremely dialed into all things Ole Miss, you probably hadn’t even heard of Chambliss in the offseason when he made the post-spring transfer from Division II Ferris State. Yeah, that story is well documented. Good. It should be. It’s insane. We watch extremely talented teams fall apart when a backup quarterback steps in. At the very least, we usually watch post-spring transfers look limited if they take over an offense early in the season.
Nothing about Chambliss is limited. He’s No. 3 in the SEC with 16 completed passes that traveled 20 yards beyond the line of scrimmage, he’s No. 3 among Power Conference quarterbacks with an 80.8% adjusted completion percentage against pressure and he’s 4th among SEC quarterbacks with 14 runs of 10-plus yards. Chambliss could improve his accuracy in the intermediate passing game (10-19 yards), but in a scheme that’s elite at creating big throwing windows, there’s a higher floor for him there than most places.
But let’s also remember something else with the team that Chambliss is leading after he took over for the injured/mistake-prone Austin Simmons.
Coming into 2025, Ole Miss ranked dead last in the SEC and No. 113 in FBS in percentage of returning production
That’s not to say Bill Connelly’s metric had the wrong projection for Ole Miss. Percentage of returning production is meant to set the expectation for regression vs. progression. In other words, it was completely fair to project regression for Kiffin’s 2025 squad.
Last year, I’d argue that Ole Miss had a top-4 roster in the sport. Do you disagree with that because it missed the Playoff with a devastating 9-3 finish to the regular season? OK, it lost 3 games by a combined 13 points. That happened while an eventual 1st-round quarterback led the No. 3 scoring offense and it had 5 NFL Draft picks from the No. 2 scoring defense in the FBS.
There’s a reason why everyone looked at Year 5 as such a pivotal season for Kiffin. It wasn’t pivotal in the way that 2025 proved to be for hot-seat coaches like Brian Kelly and James Franklin, but it was considered to be the answer to an all-important question that could shape the SEC in the latter half of the decade — can you win a national title at Ole Miss in this new era of the sport? And if not, would Kiffin go to a place where that could be possible?
A few costly mistakes prevented Ole Miss from earning that opportunity in 2024. Heading into the first Saturday of November in 2025, it’d be stunning if 1-loss Ole Miss didn’t earn that opportunity (FanDuel has Ole Miss’s latest Playoff odds at -300). There’s not a team with a winning record left on that regular-season schedule, which features 3 SEC teams that are a combined 3-11 in conference play (2 of the wins came from a Florida team who already fired Billy Napier).
Could a potential Playoff run rule out Kiffin as a candidate at Florida and LSU? We don’t know. This is an unprecedented dynamic. We do know that Kiffin could be at the center of it.
Sure, it’s possible that an Ole Miss team that’s played in 1-score games 6 of 8 times is flying a bit too close to the sun and some of those defensive issues could catch up to Kiffin’s squad in the postseason. It’s also looking increasingly possible that Ole Miss hosts a home Playoff game in the building where Kiffin has 1 loss since the start of 2023, and it could be favored to earn a quarterfinal bid that won’t happen until Dec. 31-Jan. 1. Time will tell how all of this plays out.
The safest bet is that Kiffin, who maintains that he won’t make future decisions because of money, is about to get a raise from his $9 million salary. He could one-up the Curt Cignetti contract with annual compensation in the $12-13 million range. Maybe like Cignetti, Kiffin should also be getting National Coach of the Year attention. After all, it’s clearly the best coaching job of Kiffin’s career.
He’s managed to do something that’s more impressive than shutting people up; he’s got everyone talking about him. This time, it’s for all the right reasons.
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.
