Ole Miss and Tennessee football programs now have one more thing in common, in addition to best-ever quarterbacks with the last name Manning: They’ve both been jilted by Lane Kiffin.
I will argue that Ole Miss is the more seriously aggrieved.
Kiffin infamously skipped out on the Vols after a single season, 2009, which produced a lackluster 7-6 record. And he left for his supposed “dream job” – “The greatest job in America,” he also called it – at the University of Southern California, where he’d previously been an assistant.
Vols faithful have carried an abiding grudge against Kiffin ever since, but it’s not like he betrayed them for the enemy. The teams have played only four times in history, and not at all since 1981. True, USC owns the series 4-0, but the Trojans don’t weigh on Vols fans’ minds. Or, nowadays, anyone’s.
The Lane Train spent six seasons at Ole Miss, his 55-19 record including the current 10-1 that has Ole Miss in its first ever College Football Playoff picture. Fans dared to dream about a return to the glory years of Johnny Vaught, who coached for 24 years in Oxford and delivered the school’s only real national championship in 1960.
Should we have known better? Oh, yes. Kiffin’s abrupt Tennessee departure aside, there was that unseemly dalliance with Auburn a couple of years back. A program that had previously poached Tommy Tuberville – a loss that feels less acute since Tuberville’s conversion to wing nut politician.
Still, Kiffin fed our fantasies with comments about his heart being in Oxford and him needing Ole Miss more than Ole Miss needed him. His daughter was in college there, his son in high school and playing quarterback in the state playoffs. A broken marriage that was at least partly rebuilt there.
Not to mention those 10-or-better wins for the past three seasons, something not previously done in the program’s history. We got starry-eyed.
And we’re not greedy, we Ole Miss fans. We were reasonably happy back in the 1980s-90s when Billy Brewer’s teams were managing to win at just a 55% rate. Billy was at least a former Rebel himself from the Vaught teams and became the second-winningest coach in school history.
Such was the mutual loyalty that he might still be there, in fact, if it weren’t for a series of recruiting violations that brought wrath and penalties from the NCAA. And the fact that he died in 2018.
So yes, Kiffin spoiled us with unaccustomed success. And we figured recurrent buzz about him potentially leaving was just the price to pay for that success. That and the $9 million annual salary, the agreeable name-image-likeness budget for players and the generous allotment for assistant coaches. Basically, a promise to match whatever he was offered elsewhere.
And where, as it happened, was elsewhere this year? Florida and LSU. Florida proved to be a non-starter. But a word here about LSU.
Ole Miss fans fervently hate two rivals: Mississippi State and LSU. It can be hard to decide which to hate more, but my best friend (and Ole Miss roommate) had a reasonable answer: LSU, because as a fellow flagship university and strong program it’s more worthy of enmity. State, historically a relative doormat, is more like a slightly goofy younger brother.
Then there’s the contentious history with LSU, with two examples here:
• 1959, when Billy Cannon’s 89-yard punt return gave Ole Miss its only loss in an otherwise perfect season.
• 1972, when a generous clock manager somehow allowed LSU to run two plays in the final four seconds and win 17-16.
That is the program Kiffin will now coach, reportedly for a cool $91 million for seven years. Unless he decides to bolt again, which would not be surprising.
Vanderbilt, meanwhile, just set the other standard. In most years past it could only aspire to the mediocrity of a Mississippi State, but it has rebounded to winning records the past two seasons under Clark Lea and the riveting transfer quarterback, Diego Pavia. That includes last year’s seismic upset of then-No. 1 Alabama and this year’s 10-2 regular season, its first ever with double-digit wins.
That’s the kind of turnaround that gets coaches’ names tossed about for jobs at more prominent programs and quarterbacks mentioned in Heisman Trophy conversations, and both Lea and Pavia were.
So what did Lea, a former Commodore fullback, do? He pledged his devotion and signed an extension at Vanderbilt. Pavia would probably stay too, if he could, for yet another college season. He’s what, 37 now?
Most college football fans are aware of the signature Ole Miss cheer, Hotty Toddy. Now closer than ever in second place is this one: Go to hell, LSU, go to hell. Substituting a certain coach’s name is also acceptable.
Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville. He can be reached at jrogink@gmail.com