Lane Kiffin didn’t want to talk about his future again after Ole Miss’ win over Florida on Saturday night.
The No. 7 Rebels took down Florida 34-24 after trailing 24-20 in the second half. Florida went up by four with three seconds to go before halftime before Kewan Lacy’s two touchdown runs in the fourth quarter put the game away for the Rebels.
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Ole Miss is now 10-1 ahead of its Week 13 bye and in a prime position to make the College Football Playoff even if it stumbles in Week 14 against Mississippi State. With Florida and LSU looking for head coaches — and the Gators mentioned frequently as a possible destination — Kiffin was asked directly after the game if he was going to be the head coach at Ole Miss in 2026.
“I love what we’re doing here,” Kiffin said. “Today was awesome. And I don’t talk about that stuff and really to even talk about it right now would be so disrespectful to our players and how well they played today. So, you know, we’ve got a lot of things going here, doing really well. And I love it here.”
Kiffin has repeatedly expressed his love for Ole Miss in recent weeks as he’s been the top name on the coaching market. And he’s also shown how you can build a contender at a school like Ole Miss that hasn’t won a conference title since 1963. Thanks to a healthy NIL budget and smart use of the transfer portal, Ole Miss has won at least 10 games in three consecutive seasons and four times in the last five seasons under Kiffin. You have to go back to the 60s to find a stretch even remotely close to that in Ole Miss history.
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It’s why it’s far from a guarantee that Kiffin will leave Oxford this offseason even if both Florida and LSU end up in a bidding war over him. He’s already one of the highest-paid coaches in the country and will assuredly get a new contract from Ole Miss if he doesn’t leave.
Saturday’s win was also Kiffin’s first over Florida. The Gators knocked Ole Miss out of playoff contention a season ago. This year, the win probably put Ole Miss in the postseason.
“I seriously hadn’t thought about that,” Kiffin said when asked about that first win over the Gators and what Florida did to his team a season ago. “Thanks for reminding me. It’s why we played their song, because we finally beat them. I hadn’t really thought about that but I had thought about how far our program has come because that was our first game, actually, Florida [in 2020] … but the first game of our program here, we played Florida and we were a long ways away on the field from them. We scored late so it looked like we scored a lot.
“But that day, the programs were a long ways apart. So it’s been five and half years later, almost six years later, it’s really cool to see where our program is, not just matched up against them but in the SEC.”
