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ESPN documentary on Ole Miss football's Lane Kiffin explores drama-filled career as a coach
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- ESPN documentary on Ole Miss football's Lane Kiffin explores drama-filled career as a coach
This story has been updated with new information
OXFORD — Ole Miss football coach Lane Kiffin will be in the spotlight in a new ESPN documentary.
An E60 documentary called "The Many Lives of Lane Kiffin" will premiere on Sept. 24 at 6 p.m. CT on ESPN. Ryan McGee, a senior writer at ESPN, announced the news Sept. 3 by sharing the trailer on X.
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In the trailer, McGee is shown interviewing Kiffin in the Ole Miss team room. Title cards in the documentary call Kiffin a genius, a villain, a mastermind and a pop star. The film promises to go over some of the most interesting and controversial parts of Kiffin's coaching history.
Kiffin has built a reputation as a unique, unpredictable coach. His antics include bringing a basketball goal on the sideline at games, making TikToks with his daughter and trolling other SEC coaches online .
One of Kiffin's first big jobs was at Southern Cal, where he was hired by Pete Carroll in 2001 to be an assistant coach. He was part of the Trojans teams from 2002 to 2005 that won a record 16 consecutive games against AP top-25 teams.
At 31, Kiffin became the youngest head coach in NFL history when he was hired by the Oakland Raiders in 2007. His tenure there was short-lived; he was fired in September 2008.
Kiffin was hired in November 2008 to replace Phillip Fulmer as coach at Tennessee. His time with the Vols is one of the most controversial periods in his career. He led Tennessee to a second-place finish in the SEC East in 2009 — then bolted to become the coach at Southern Cal.
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Tennessee fans felt slighted after he left; that sentiment clearly remained a decade later, when Kiffin and Ole Miss played in Knoxville in 2021 . Fans threw a golf ball, a mustard bottle and other debris at him in a heated game at Neyland Stadium that the Rebels won 31-26.
Kiffin has displayed a willingness to poke fun at everything and anything on social media. His reputation as an online troll is well known. Recently, he joked about a fishing picture Auburn coach Hugh Freeze once posted to social media. Kiffin also took a jab at LSU coach Brian Kelly's dancing , referring to a viral video.
He was fired at Southern Cal in 2013, famously being left on the tarmac after the Trojans flew back to Los Angeles following a loss at Arizona State. After stops at Alabama (three seasons as offensive coordinator) and Florida Atlantic (three seasons as head coach), Kiffin became Ole Miss' coach in 2020. He is going into his sixth season at Ole Miss, which makes it his longest tenure professionally.
Kiffin has worked under legendary coaches such as Carroll and Alabama's Nick Saban, and he is vocal about the impact those icons have played in developing him as a coach. Those influences include his father, longtime NFL assistant coach Monte Kiffin, who died in July 2024. Between the people he has learned from and the teams he has coached, Kiffin is a fascinating subject for a documentary.
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"I saw something somebody sent me the other day," he said in the documentary trailer. "Someone was doing a story that said Lane Kiffin would be the most intriguing person to actually know the real stops and all the interactions that really happened. I was like, 'That's probably true.' "
Sam Hutchens covers Ole Miss for the Clarion Ledger. Email him at Shutchens@gannett.com or reach him on X at @Sam_Hutchens_
This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Lane Kiffin documentary: ESPN features Tennessee, Southern Cal, NFL
