As Mississippi fans pulled mustard bottles and golf balls from their Christmas stockings in preparation for Lane Kiffin’s return visit next season, I hate to tell the Rebels faithful there’s really only one form of payback that’ll cut Kiffin deepest.
Pelting him with a yellow Strata range ball or trashing your own field with French’s bottles simply won’t do. Tennessee fans already tried that. Kiffin enjoyed it so much, he kept the golf ball as a souvenir.
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To make Kiffin feel pain, Ole Miss must prove its former coach wrong.
How? By winning the national championship and showing Kiffin it didn’t need him to do so.
If yoga-abstaining Pete Golding celebrates a national title, you just know Kiffin will torture himself wondering whether he made the right decision. Because, Kiffin wouldn’t have thought Golding glory possible, or at least incredibly unlikely.
If Kiffin thought Ole Miss could win the national championship, he wouldn’t be tweeting from Baton Rouge or making grocery runs on vacation in SoCal or posting a pic from after his latest hot yoga sesh. He’d still be coaching the Rebels.
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That’s an opinion, but I believe it to be true.
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When Kiffin chose LSU over accepting a raise to stay at Ole Miss and coach the Rebels in the playoff, he signaled he doesn’t think this team can win the grand prize.
For Ole Miss to score the truest, sweetest payback, I guess there’s only one thing left to do, as the movie character Jake Taylor put it in “Major League.” Win the whole bleepin’ thing.
To continue that quest, Ole Miss will need to upset No. 3 Georgia in the Sugar Bowl.
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Would Lane Kiffin have left a national championship team? Doubt it
Coaches, even renegades like Kiffin, don’t walk out on national championship teams.
Kiffin takes pride in his analytical mindset. He helped popularize the idea of going for fourth down instead of punting, when the analytical charts indicate keeping the offense on the field is the smarter mathematical move.
Kiffin didn’t leave Ole Miss for LSU on a whim. Instead, he analyzed LSU, Florida and Ole Miss and deduced, rightly or wrongly, he’d have the best opportunity to win a national championship in Baton Rouge.
Never mind that Ole Miss reached the playoff this season. Not all teams that reach a 12-team playoff enjoy a strong chance to win the title.
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Kiffin wanted to coach the Rebels in the postseason as LSU’s coach. Unsurprisingly, Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter didn’t go for that idea. If Kiffin truly believed Ole Miss had a prime chance to win the national title and flourish in perpetuity, push wouldn’t have come to shove. He would’ve stayed. That’s my belief, anyway.
The odds said the Rebels were a longshot to be national champion of this playoff. Our eyeballs told us Ole Miss had an excellent offense but a permeable defense, and wouldn’t it need a better defense to win four playoff games? Kiffin couldn’t miss what the rest of us noticed.
While Lane Kiffin tweets at LSU, Ole Miss can get payback
Kiffin likes to say he doesn’t think outside the box. He builds a new box.
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We saw a sixth-seeded playoff team and an incredible long-term opportunity for Kiffin to flourish at Ole Miss. He saw a playoff loser, a glitzy job at LSU and fertile recruiting ground from which he could build that new box in Baton Rouge.
And, so, Kiffin left, just as Brian Kelly left Notre Dame for LSU before him.
Kiffin and Kelly each watched Nick Saban, Les Miles and Ed Orgeron win a national championship coaching the Tigers. If those guys could do it, why couldn’t they? Kelly must still be wondering that.
Kiffin became the “Portal King” at Ole Miss, but LSU enjoys high school recruiting advantages as a national brand operating as the lone Power Four school within a talent-rich state.
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These aren’t new ideas. Kelly harbored this outlook after arriving from Notre Dame. He failed at LSU, never making the playoff in four seasons.
Despite the oft-recited fact LSU has had three coaches win national titles during this millennium, here’s another reality: LSU has made the CFP just once in 12 installments of either the four- or 12-team playoff.
NIL and transfer free agency changed the game. What Saban achieved at LSU in the 2003 season matters less now than ever before.
Kelly learned the hard way national titles don’t grow on the bald cypress trees in Louisiana. That’s just Spanish moss.
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Kelly built an LSU team good enough for the Texas Bowl. That got him fired. Kiffin built Ole Miss into a playoff program. That made him the darling of the coaching carousel.
Kiffin must believe he can attain national championship glory at LSU, something he didn’t think Ole Miss capable of achieving. Kiffin finding out he was wrong about Ole Miss would be a form of payback he’d never forget.
Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network’s senior national college football columnist. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Ole Miss’ worst revenge on Lane Kiffin would be winning national title
