Lane Kiffin doesn't know how to say goodbye

It was a surprise when the Saturday deadline for Lane Kiffin's decision to either stay at Ole Miss or depart for greener SEC pastures turned into a Sunday one. It shouldn't have been.

Kiffin is a well-regarded innovator and, most importantly to this exercise, head coach who wins games. He also loves a mess, almost always of his own design. The story of him leaving Tennessee for Southern California back in 2009 is titled "'All Hell Broke Loose'." His tenure with the Trojans created the "left on the tarmac" meme applied to most underperforming coaches returning home from a brutal road loss.

We've only touched on the first two jobs and five years of his career as a college head coach. We're already two oral histories deep.

Thus, it shouldn't be a surprise the man who engineered four double-digit win seasons in his last five tries at Mississippi held college football hostage with his latest career decision. Kiffin saw his opportunity to wrench at the spotlight in the final week of the regular season. A glut of head coach openings across Power 4 conference programs and a shrinking pool of qualified candidates meant 2025's coaching search effectively turned into his Bar Mitzvah — his ascension to elite coach (despite zero national or conference titles at a Power 4 school) and the sun at the center of coaching's solar system.

Kiffin's Saturday-after-the-Egg-Bowl mandate came and passed with nothing to show for it but fatigue across the college football landscape (especially for poor Marty Smith, who stared beyond the swinging doors that separate the waking world from purgatory for 24 hours of non-updates in Oxford). News leaked he was expected to take the LSU job, leaving a Kiffin-style puddle of mess to slowly seep from the story every minute that passed without official confirmation.

Then came the report of a 9 a.m. local time team meeting for Sunday morning — the kind of meeting you don't need to have if you're telling your players you're sticking around (they'd settle for a text message and the latitude to sleep in). Then the report that meeting was postponed to the afternoon minutes before it was set to take place, which is a remarkable middle finger to the players responsible for putting a twice-redeemed (or possibly more) head coach in position to take a starring role at a blue blood college football program.

Then, an ultimatum.

On3's Chris Low reported Kiffin was taking most of his staff with him to Baton Rouge, leaving Ole Miss to play its first ever College Football Playoff game without the coaches that turned Trinidad Chambliss from Division II standout to SEC star. It's more proof that college coaches still hold more power than players even in the era of NIL payments and transfer portals. It's also a reminder Kiffin has no idea how to say goodbye, and no one on his priority list above "Lane Kiffin."

Leaving for LSU wouldn't have necessarily been a problem — a nebula of hurt feelings, sure, though not necessarily a circus. But the football gods demanded chaos. They needed to stress test the mechanics of a head-coaching hire in the midst of an expanded playoff. They dialed up as many g-forces as possible to see if their plane could hold together and now Kiffin is doing his damnedest to break as much as he can into pieces.

This creates a situation that stinks for everyone involved but the guy at the center of it. Kiffin's players are getting abandoned at the most important juncture for Ole Miss football since Beatlemania was running wild. The assistants who may want to stay on and see things through have to choose between abandoning their guys or sticking around to the end, knowing whomever takes Kiffin's place probably won't keep them. The folks at LSU are about to make a stunning financial commitment to a coach who, again, had things end so badly at his previous two Power 4 stops that it merited multiple oral histories.

I guess it's a natural fit that a governor who wants to be Huey Long is getting a head coach who, dramatically, can only be Lane Kiffin. LSU made it clear winning was the only concern well before Kiffin cropped up on its radar — Brian Kelly, the man Kiffin is set to replace, oversaw an operation whose negligence allowed a student assistant to die when he was at Notre Dame. The beauty of Kiffin's run in Baton Rouge won't ultimately be measured in rivalry game wins or playoff appearances. The Tigers have had plenty of those. It will be measured by how Kiffin manages to engineer his next exit, and how stupid, messy and confusing his time grasping that spotlight with both hands will be.

This article originally appeared on For The Win: Lane Kiffin doesn't know how to say goodbye