Lane Kiffin Is Not the Biggest Hypocrite in His Own Move to LSU

On Sunday, LSU hired Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin, capping the messiest saga in the sordid history of college-football-coach poaching. Kiffin left Ole Miss right before the Rebels host a game in the College Football Playoff, amid perhaps the best season the team has ever had. The coach, once known as a brilliant but obnoxious figure in the sport, has an unparalleled ability to leave jobs on bad terms. Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis called Kiffin a con man as he fired him. Kiffin ditched Tennessee after one year to go to USC, which fired him at the airport after a bad road loss. (When Kiffin returned to Tennessee years later with Ole Miss, fans threw plastic bottles at him.) He once took a new job before the playoff and planned to continue in his role with Alabama but was told to leave early because Nick Saban didn’t think he was focused enough. Nothing about Kiffin has ever been calm or normal.

But he had spent the past few years softening his image. He was sober now, a better father. He’d found a home at a historic SEC mediocrity, Ole Miss, and built an elite program while doing hot yoga and tweeting lots of jokes.

It was all, at the least, a neat branding exercise. But somehow, Lane Kiffin was not the most insincere person involved in his own move from Mississippi to Louisiana.

In late October, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry made one of the loudest and theoretically boldest stands against the financial excesses of college football. Days earlier, LSU had fired Brian Kelly, the head coach who had gone 34–14 in three and a half years leading the Tigers. Usually, governors don’t have much to do with football hiring and firing decisions. But Landry was apparently so incensed by the $54 million buyout the school would owe Kelly that he started throwing his weight around.

In a press conference at the state Capitol in Baton Rouge, minutes from Tiger Stadium, Landry staked out his turf. He essentially fired athletic director Scott Woodward from the podium, saying that the man who had hired Kelly would not get the chance to bring on another coach at LSU. Woodward, who has an unparalleled trend of hiring coaches who later receive historically large buyouts, resigned quickly. The Republican governor had personal beef with Woodward, whom he saw as a liberal machine operator; it didn’t help that Woodward once failed to heed the governor’s advice about hiring a specific basketball coach. Landry was giving a press conference that was nominally about nutrition benefits during the government shutdown, but he took the opportunity to talk about something else: LSU’s firing of Kelly.

“I’m tired of rewarding failure in this country and then leaving the taxpayers to foot the bill,” the good governor said. Taxpayers do not pay coaching buyouts, typically, and the school’s athletics department doesn’t draw on public funds directly. But the point is well taken. It’s not great when public universities pay tens of millions of dollars for coaches not to work. Even when LSU isn’t taking state money, its very existence and power are the result of the Louisianan public building the place up over generations. That Brian Kelly could take $50 million from LSU is an affront to public trust even though Landry’s facts were wrong.

Then the governor took aim at a cabal of powerful agents. “Look at who represents all these people, like all these agents,” he said. “You know what’s interesting? Woodward’s agent, Kelly’s agent, they all have the same agent. Like, this is ridiculous. All of you would be disbarred by the way these agents act.” (Landry had some facts wrong again, but a few agents really do control the top end of the coaching market.) Gawking at Kelly’s $54 million buyout, Landry vowed, “We are not doing that again.”

It’s impossible to overstate how much Landry’s subsequent actions failed to match his words. To get Kiffin, the school agreed to a contract that might as well be the ultimate symbol of the profligacy that Landry was grandstanding against back in October. LSU offered Kiffin a seven-year deal worth $13 million a year, immediately making him the second-highest-paid coach in the country, all before a set of massive bonuses. Tying coach pay to actual performance is a worthwhile idea to rein in contracts, but it has less teeth when the base salary itself is a market-resetting number. Ole Miss and Florida were both reportedly prepared to dole out similar financial packages, but LSU found ways to set itself apart. In a bespoke handout to Kiffin, LSU is even contributing bonuses that Ole Miss would have given him for advancing to this year’s playoff. Needless to say, that has never happened before, because a head coach has never left his team before the playoff.

Kiffin is a great coach and was the best option on the market this year, so he had supply and demand in his favor. But he’s not the second-best coach in the country, and his contract reflects almost none of the restraint that Landry crowed about earlier this fall. LSU will probably fire Kiffin one day, just as most of his employers have at one point or another. (The alternative is that Kiffin leaves for the NFL or Alabama. He doesn’t stay in one place forever.) And if the university does fire Kiffin, it will owe him 80 percent of his remaining salary, an amount that could dwarf the $50-plus million it owes his predecessor. Kiffin’s contract is even less responsible than that: The school did not include “offset” language that would require a fired Kiffin to look for another job, where his payments would lower the amount LSU owes him.

The lack of an offset clause is where LSU’s dealings with Kiffin, on the heels of Landry’s press conference, become truly absurd. Even Kelly’s contract—which LSU just spent weeks trying to get out of honoring, before relenting—has an offset clause. It’s unlikely the school will have to pay its ex-coach anywhere close to $50 million. But if Kiffin gets fired, it will have to shell out every red cent of the tens of millions of dollars remaining on his deal. It is the exact thing that Landry railed against. The agent who consummated the deal for Kiffin is the same agent who is most commonly criticized by people like Landry for having too much influence over the sport. (Kiffin claims that the agent negotiated the details without even telling him, because he was committed to not letting his own compensation guide the move. OK, then.)

Even more amusing, Kiffin said at his introductory press conference that he spoke with Landry during the coaching search. Landry not only railed against lopsided coaching contracts, then stood by as his underlings did the thing he had claimed to be mad about—he joined the recruiting effort himself, not just blessing the contract and talking to Kiffin but, according to Yahoo Sports, working to line up donors to pay Kiffin’s players.

Generally, governors do not have a ton to do with coach hiring and firing, even when they control the boards at the universities making the moves. But Louisiana has always operated differently, going back to the football-obsessed Huey Long nearly a century ago. Was that what Landry was going for here? Maybe so. He had the opportunity to put himself in the news and position himself opposite the reviled Kelly and the athletic director who stuck LSU with the big bill. He saw the chance to brand himself as a college sports reformer, a mantle politicians from both parties have tried to seize the past few years. He saw the chance to pretend he cared about fiscal discipline too.

The course Landry charted after that press conference was different. Nobody will be shocked that at the confluence of state politics and college football, someone’s actions didn’t match his words. But even in two industries full of duplicity, the governor’s shamelessness in doing the opposite of what he said stands out. LSU may win a national championship, or Kiffin may flame out and cost the school tens of millions of dollars, or maybe even both. Either way, the industry Landry pretended to target for reform will keep on booming.