Love him or hate him, Lane Kiffin is one of college football’s last true characters

In retrospect, ESPN’s E60: The Many Lives of Lane Kiffin was one of the most important pieces of sports content of 2025.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I still recommend it. Just be warned, it’s already outdated.

The CliffNotes version: a hotshot coaching prodigy enjoys a rapid rise to stardom and an even faster fall from grace, only to reestablish himself as one of college football’s best and most unique head coaches while finding peace in his personal life via maturity, sobriety and a newfound enthusiasm for hot yoga. As we leave Kiffin at the end of the 2024 season, he had just turned down the opportunity to take a high-profile job at Auburn, opting to stay at a less prestigious program in Ole Miss. If you watched the hour-long mini-documentary, you likely figured that he’d spend the rest of his career — and perhaps life — in Oxford. In many ways, the episode felt more apt for Disney+ than it did ESPN Unlimited.

Suffice it to say, an alternate ending is now in order.

But while the bizarre nature of Kiffin’s career path — which, as you may have heard, has now landed him at LSU — serves as the central plotline of the E60 episode, what stood out most was the unique nature of personality. Ever since the Oakland Raiders hired him to be their head coach at just 31 years old, Monte Kiffin’s son has truly been one of a kind. And even 17 years later, the same coach who announced his arrival at Tennessee by accusing  Urban Meyer of cheating just performed a pregame interview in which he claimed Mississippi State had broken into Ole Miss’ locker room and to steal star quarterback Trinidad Chambliss’ jersey the night before their in-state rivalry game.

“I guess you expect nothing less from these people,” Kiffin told ESPN’s Marty Smith just ahead of the Rebels’ 38-19 victory in the Egg Bowl on Friday.

Many have even pointed to this LSU saga as evidence that Kiffin hasn’t actually changed all that much. Sure, the circumstances might different for a variety of reasons. But it was hard not to think about the protests that broke out in Knoxville when he left Tennessee for USC after just one season in 2009 as footage of Ole Miss fans yelling at the 50-year-old as he boarded his plane to Baton Rouge flooded social media on Sunday. As the cliche (especially when it involves LSU) goes, a Tiger doesn’t change his stripes.

Personally, I don’t know how much Lane Kiffin has or hasn’t actually changed. And admittedly, the E60 episode that I’ve spent the last two months raving about now largely feels like a coordinated effort to help rehabilitate his image, just to make him more appealing for job like the one who just took.

But even if that’s what happened here, that doesn’t make the footage of the now-LSU head coach discussing his enthusiasm for hot yoga or recalling his unique relationship with Al Davis any less entertaining. Nor does it make the story of a one-time prodigy who hit rock bottom and worked his way back to the top of his profession — which only afforded him the opportunity to repeat his villainous behavior in the eyes of many — any less Shakesperean.

I also can’t help but think that Kiffin is the only current college head coach capable of generating a month-long news cycle like the one we just endured. Sure, it would have been a really big deal if Kirby Smart or Ryan Day left their teams for new jobs in the middle of playoff runs. But there isn’t another head coach in the sport who carries the same public baggage as Kiffin, who has been one football’s most polarizing figures for nearly two decades now.

Whether you love them or hate them, these are the personalities that most would agree help make college football as special as it is. And with all due respect to Dabo Swinney and Curt Cignetti, you’d be hard pressed to find a head coach currently capable of eliciting the type of emotions and reactions that Kiffin has throughout the last week, in Oxford and elsewhere.

That much was evident in the aftermath of the Egg Bowl, in which he confronted On3’s Ben Garrett, who had invoked a Ludacris lyric — “can’t turn a hoe into a housewife; hoes don’t act right” — when discussing Kiffin’s history of job-hopping during an episode of his Ole Miss podcast.

“You want to walk in here and call me a hoe?” Kiffin asked Garrett, referring to his postgame press conference. “We’ll see how that goes.”

I’ll save the debate of whether Garrett was actually calling Kiffin a “hoe” for a different day. But there’s another early-2000s rap lyric that I believe best sums up his place in the college football ecosystem.

“Everybody feel a way about K, but at least, y’all feel something,” Kanye West says on 2004’s “Bring Me Down.”

Just as we saw when he made his return to Knoxville with Ole Miss in 2021 and just as we’ll see when the Bayou Bengals play in Oxford next season, Lane Kiffin certainly makes college football fans feel something.