Let’s go back to when Ole Miss hired Lane Kiffin in December 2019.

It was, by all accounts, a splashy addition for all the obvious reasons. Kiffin spent the previous 6 years resurrecting his career and reestablished himself as one of the best offensive minds in the sport. Three of those came in the Nick Saban coaching rehabilitation program as Alabama’s offensive coordinator and 3 of those came in Boca Raton, where he led FAU to historic success.

Kiffin was the opposite of Matt Luke, who helped right the ship after Hugh Freeze-era NCAA sanctions limited the depth of the program. If Luke could’ve coached at Ole Miss forever, he probably would’ve. He was a former Ole Miss center who worked as a grad assistant and later an on-field assistant with 2 separate stints for 3 Ole Miss head coaches. Loyalty would never be in question, which was why athletic director Keith Carter gave Luke a vote of confidence in mid-November 2019:

“I think our football program is headed in a great direction,” Carter said during the press conference. “I’m so excited about Coach Luke. He’s our coach, and we couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity we have next week in Starkville. We’re excited about where recruiting is and excited about where the future is headed. We’re going to get behind Coach Luke, and we’re going to try to get after the Bulldogs next week and get to that fifth win.”

Ten days later, Luke was fired. A mass exodus appeared imminent for the Ole Miss locker room. Offensive lineman Chandler Tuitt was quoted after the Luke firing as saying “there’s no program without players.”

Well, I’ve got news for the 2019 version of Tuitt and skeptics like myself — Kiffin has done the unthinkable in 4 years.

He had historic success and didn’t use it to leave for another job.

Yeah, I can say that even if Kiffin leaves next year. Barring some wildly unforeseen development, Kiffin will return to Oxford for Year 5 having delivered the best regular season win total in program history (10). Twice. When Ole Miss takes on Penn State, Kiffin will try to notch what would be a program-record 11th win. Win or lose, he’s poised to deliver the program multiple top-15 seasons in a 3-year stretch for the first time since the John F. Kennedy administration.

And yet, even though Kiffin’s name surfaced as a candidate for bigger jobs like Auburn, LSU and Texas A&M, he’s still building the program in Oxford.

I can guarantee you that if you polled the casual college football fan in December 2019 and set the over/under of Kiffin’s seasons at Ole Miss at 4.5, the overwhelming choice would’ve been for the “under.” Anyone taking the over would’ve assumed that it was a bit more of a slow build, and not that Kiffin would have the program in multiple New Year’s 6 bowls in his first 4 seasons on the job.

Don’t take that for granted, especially in a time when only 3 SEC head coaches have been at their current jobs longer than Kiffin.

Yeah, it’s frustrating that Kiffin can’t beat the big boys and that there’s clearly a talent gap that’ll be daunting to overcome (it also doesn’t help that he had a DC and an OC poached to take the same job at another school). I’ve said on several platforms that there’s a troubling stat that prevents him from being a Tier 1 head coach in the sport.

Entering this season, Kiffin was 1-19 against Power 5 teams that went on to win at least 9 regular-season games. Before 2023, his first and only victory in that spot was at USC in 2011 when he led the Trojans to a 38-35 upset win at No. 4 Oregon. In many ways, that game set the stage for USC to start the following season at No. 1 in the country. We know what happened after that. One disappointing 2012 season, 1 disappointing start to the 2013 season and 1 infamous firing on the tarmac, etc.

But Kiffin is now a decade into his own personal rebuild, and he even slightly improved that damning stat by beating eventual 9-3 LSU this season (he’s now 2-21 vs. Power 5 teams that won at least 9 regular-season games). There’s never been a better time to show that Kiffin can win a game like that. Why? The 12-team Playoff is on the horizon. One would assume that the vast majority of the competition within it will be Power 5 teams that are at least 9-3.

Kiffin will be an interesting case study in how the perception of a coach can change in the 12-team Playoff, even if some of those same limitations are still there. He and James Franklin have become the ultimate “can’t win the big one, but you’re still much better off with them than without them” coaches. Fitting, it is, that they’ll face off in a New Year’s 6 bowl to close the 4-team Playoff era.

The difference between those 2 coaches is that Franklin is closing out Year 10. While he has certainly moved past some of the rumors of a potential departure, Franklin’s approval rating took a hit in 2023 because he fell to 4-16 against Michigan and Ohio State. Could Kiffin be on a similar path? That is, stay in Oxford for a decade, win a ton of games but still come up short every year against the big boys of the SEC? And if so, would his approval rating take a hit?

It’s worth asking. It’s also worth asking if there are more than 3 jobs that Kiffin would leave Ole Miss for. Nobody really knows about replacing Nick Saban at Alabama, or if Kiffin would entertain the idea of getting an opportunity at a traditional power up north like Michigan or Ohio State.

All we know is that 4 years in, Kiffin lived up to what he said he’d do back in that introductory press conference 4 years ago.

“We didn’t come here to be good, that’s not why we’re here today. We came here to be great,” he said in 2019. “This was not a ‘Hey, we’re gonna take a job just to get back to the SEC.'”

Time will tell if Ole Miss can take another step to become great, though 10-2 certainly isn’t far removed from that. Outside of his time working his way up as an assistant at USC in the early 2000s, Kiffin has never stayed in the same job for more than 4 years.

There’s a first time for everything.