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Lane Kiffin on how Ole Miss' racial history made it difficult to recruit Black players
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- Lane Kiffin on how Ole Miss' racial history made it difficult to recruit Black players
The already contentious relationship between Lane Kiffin and the University of Mississippi just got a little thornier.
In an interview with Vanity Fair for a profile published on Monday, May 11 , the first-year LSU coach, who spent the previous six seasons at Ole Miss , said he faced difficulties attracting top recruits to the Rebels due to the university's sordid racial history and the longtime connection it had with Confederate symbols.
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Kiffin told the publication that elite prospects would tell him "Hey, coach, we really like you. But my grandparents aren't letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi."
"That doesn't come up when you say Baton Rouge, Louisiana," Kiffin said . "Parents were sitting here this weekend saying the campus's diversity feels so great: 'It feels like there's no segregation. And we want that for our kid because that's the real world.'"
During a conversation the next day, Kiffin told Vanity Fair that he hoped his comment "comes across respectful to Ole Miss…. There are some things that I'm saying that are factual, they're not shots."
Kiffin coached at Ole Miss from 2020-25, a run capped off by a College Football Playoff appearance last season. After weeks of will-he-or-won't-he speculation, Kiffin left the Rebels before the playoff to go to LSU, which lured him away with a seven-year, $91 million deal. Under new head coach Pete Golding, Ole Miss advanced all the way to the playoff semifinals, where it lost to Miami 31-27.
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Confederate flags were widely displayed at Rebels home games until the late 1990s, when the school instituted a ban on sticks at sporting events in 1997. Colonel Reb, a goateed southern planter, was sidelined as Ole Miss' mascot in 2003 and replaced in 2010 by a black bear (which was later replaced by a shark in 2018). Even the university's unofficial name, Ole Miss, has roots extending back to the days of slavery.
As the Vanity Fair story noted, about 26% of Oxford residents are Black, compared to 51% of Baton Rouge residents.
Whatever obstacles Kiffin believed were in his way only had so much of an impact on his recruiting efforts. Each of his final five full high-school recruiting classes with the Rebels were ranked in the top 20 nationally, according to 247Sports.
Like many universities across the country, and particularly in the SEC, LSU has its own unsavory history of race relations that extends into athletics. The school's athletic nickname, the Tigers , comes from a moniker given to Louisiana soldiers in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War. More recently, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry, who was prominently involved in the coaching search that brought Kiffin to LSU, has declared a state of emergency and suspended the state's congressional primaries after an April 29 ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais that Louisiana's majority-Black 6th Congressional District was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
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Kiffin is scheduled to make his return to Oxford on Sept. 19, when Ole Miss hosts LSU in their annual rivalry game.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Lane Kiffin said it's easier to recruit Black players to LSU than Ole Miss
