BATON ROUGE, LA – Lane Kiffin left the rocking chairs behind. They're still at his old house in Mississippi .
Call it the byproduct of a coach too busy to buy a new home and relocate his possessions.
Or, call it symbolism.
Kiffin put rockers on his front porch in Oxford, and on his Ole Miss office balcony. He didn't sit in them much. They were meant to showcase his embrace of a Mississippi lifestyle.
As Kiffin puts it, if you don't drive when the light turns green in Mississippi, "they don't even honk. They just wait for you to go."
He calls that chapter of his life, "Mississippi slowdown."
"The slowdown was so good for me," Kiffin says.
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So good, schools like LSU and Florida wanted to hire him.
Kiffin took a job he deems better than his last. Along with the rocking chairs, he left a College Football Playoff team, ended the best tenure of his career, and smeared the image he'd meticulously built in Mississippi.
A fanbase that chanted his name at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium gave him middle-finger salutes at the Oxford Airport and cursed him as he boarded an LSU plane.
What'll this LSU chapter be called?
"I can't give you a spoiler," Kiffin, 51, says.
How about, the villain rises.
Kiffin wants to show me something. We walk from his office to LSU's football staff meeting room, where four quotes are taped inside the door.
Kiffin points out the fourth quote, from Boston Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla: " I'm attracted to the dark side of greatness. The gap between a hero and a villain is very similar to the gap between winning and losing, and good to great. The gap is so much closer than people think ."
Back inside Kiffin's office, his thoughts linger on Mazzulla's quote.
"I'm not like a big history guy or Marvel comics and movies," Kiffin says, "but a lot of times, the hero becomes the villain, then becomes the hero again."
The latest twist of Kiffin's arc rekindled his villain status. He's now turned heel on two SEC jobs. In between, Southern California fired him.
Kiffin stirs up attention. His professional breakups get messy. He further inflamed Ole Miss with a few verbal jabs after his exit.
Earlier in his career, he "used to really like" playing the villain, he admits. He leaned into it. He sounds more conflicted about the role now.
"You change in life," he says.
Anyway, he's not convinced his story ends with him as the villain. He just needs to cross the gap, a gap he's crossed once before, a gap that's not as big as you'd think — at least according to the quote taped to the inside of LSU's staff room door.
Kiffin's got a plan for how to resurrect his image, once again.
"Winning," Kiffin said, "and being a good person."
That's how he aims to repair his reputation.
Win, and prove his decision correct.
"That's really how it works," he says.
Villain or not, LSU athletic director Verge Ausberry knows this: Multiple prominent programs tried to plunder Kiffin during this past coaching carousel. LSU succeeded.
"He's our guy ," Ausberry says.
Six months after LSU got its guy, the wounds remain raw in Mississippi, and inside Kiffin's LSU office.
The scene at the Oxford Airport still bothers Kiffin. Ole Miss fans assembled to give Kiffin a sendoff fit for a turncoat. He can still hear the F-words. Some of the profanity, he says, was directed at his 12-year-old nephew.
Fandom hinges on loyalty. When you're their guy and you deliver success, they'll eat up everything you serve and treat you like a king. Shift your allegiance to a rival, and they'll spit you out and curse your name.
"That's the SEC. That's sports. That's passion. That's what makes it great," Kiffin says. "But, it does mess with you. I'm human. That airport scene messed with me.
"I'm not mad at them, (but) it just does something to you. Because, it's like, wait, these are the same people that said all these other things, right to me."
Kiffin wanted to take the LSU job but also coach the Rebels in the playoff . Ole Miss made him choose: Either be LSU's coach, or the Rebels coach, not both.
He chose LSU.
Mississippi fans weren't the only ones put off by Kiffin's decision. Everyone from Joe Lunchbucket to Pundit Paul seemed to want Kiffin to stay at Ole Miss.
Why?
"I think it was just a good story," Kiffin said.
It was more than that.
Arkansas was Ole Miss' top competition for Kiffin when it hired him from Florida Atlantic . By the time he left Ole Miss six years later, he'd become the coaching carousel's hottest name.
As Kiffin's stock soared, John Q. Public wanted him to show unflinching loyalty to his team and to a school that hired him when schools like LSU wouldn't have him. People wanted to believe Kiffin had changed for the better. They saw his exit as a revival of old plot lines.
Kiffin, at the age of 34, spurned Tennessee after one season in favor of "dream job" Southern Cal, a decision that ignited a literal mini-riot in Knoxville.
Throughout Kiffin's redemption arc, he frequently said he needed Oxford and Ole Miss more than they needed him. Truthfully, they needed each other. They were good together. Kiffin became the best Ole Miss coach since Johnny Vaught.
At Ole Miss, Kiffin changed some personal habits. He's shared he quit drinking alcohol in 2021. He started pouring more into his family. He got healthier. He lost weight. He rebuffed Auburn's overture in 2022, crediting his daughter, Landry, for helping persuade him to stay.
All of that, Kiffin says, constituted real change.
"When (people) say, 'Oh, he's not who we thought he was,' that bothers me," Kiffin says. "If I hadn't changed, I would've taken the Auburn job years before, … because that was the old me of, like, 'Oh, something's bigger, something's better, make a fast decision and go.'
"I did change, and I meant every word — and I still do — about me needing Oxford and Ole Miss more than it needed me. I did. None of that went away.
"It's just, I made a job decision."
Bitter ending aside, Kiffin describes his Ole Miss tenure as "a great six-year run" filled with "wonderful memories."
Then, the light turned green. Kiffin accelerated.
An angry crowd beat him to the airport.
"(When) you leave by choice, but everything is going good on their end, they love it, and one person just leaves the relationship, there's a lot of hatred," Kiffin said, comparing his exit to a divorce. "There's a lot of villainizing, and that's OK."
Kiffin uses analytics to inform his game-day decisions, so of course he applied percentages to his job evaluation.
The way he's figured it, only 1% of coaches retire happily after a long, successful run. The other 99% of tenures will end in one of three ways: The coach will leave, he'll get fired, or he'll be forced out.
Kiffin didn't crunch data to confirm his percentages, but his theory speaks to his state of mind. He cites anecdotal evidence like TCU firing Gary Patterson, its best coach in program history , amid his 21st season.
"I started thinking, there's legends who'd done much more than what I'd done at Ole Miss, and they ended up getting fired or pushed out," Kiffin said.
TCU built Patterson a statue, at least. James Franklin didn't get a bust from Penn State , just a severance check.
"James Franklin was just in the final four, and he was fired (the next October)," Kiffin says. "We're in a different time of college football."
Even if Kiffin's percentages are correct, that means some coaches do retire happily to form the 1%. Kiffin could've joined the 1% club at Ole Miss, with premier job security and a statue on deck. Ole Miss made that pitch. It didn't land.
"So many people would be like, 'Why would you just not stay there?' But, it's also not like me to take an easier way. I like challenges," Kiffin said. "When they would say to me, 'You know, you can have 6-6 or 7-5 seasons here, and you'll still be fine,' I'd go, 'No I won't. I'll be miserable.' … I hate losing. I love winning."
Talk to Kiffin for long enough, and you'll hear several explanations for why he picked LSU.
Nick Saban told him he'd regret not taking the job, and Kiffin didn't want the pain of regret.
Pete Carroll, another mentor, told Kiffin his late father, Monte, would've told him to embrace the opportunity.
Kiffin put the jobs to a family vote, and LSU received the most votes, he says.
There's also his "new challenge" explanation.
I'm wondering if these reasons dance around the heart of the decision. I share with Kiffin a couple of theories I've formed about why he took the LSU job:
1. He likes the spotlight and craves the bigger stage of LSU and Tiger Stadium. Ole Miss football is a big deal. It's the SEC, after all. LSU football is bigger.
2. In comparing Ole Miss and LSU through an analytical decision-making lens, Kiffin sees LSU as the superior job.
He doesn't dispute either theory. He felt pulled to LSU's stage.
"Right or wrong, you have that (pull) in you," he said. "When I was at Alabama , we played at Ole Miss, I never walked into the stadium like, 'Ooo, you need to be here.' I didn't. It doesn't mean I was right or wrong."
As to Theory No. 2 of applying analytics to the choice?
"I definitely look at decisions that way," he said.
Kiffin's first LSU signing class ranked higher than his best class at Ole Miss. He didn't become a better recruiter overnight. LSU attracts a higher level of high school talent than the "Portal King" amassed at Ole Miss.
The Ole Miss collective ponied up to fund Kiffin's plunders amid a pay-for-play era, but Ausberry, without revealing exact figures, says LSU outspent the Rebels last season.
"I know we did," Ausberry said. "We were one of the top (spenders) in the country."
To show for its investment, LSU finished 7-6 in Brian Kelly's final season .
"LSU should always be one of the top programs in the country," Ausberry said. "Always."
In Kiffin, Ausberry hired a coach who won at least 10 games in six of his nine total seasons at Florida Atlantic and Ole Miss, places where such records didn't previously happen regularly.
Ausberry won't detail the price tag for this LSU roster. Nobody would deny the roster investment is substantial, to pair with Kiffin's $91 million contract .
"I want to be consistent," Ausberry said. "Not just win (big) one year and then drop. Lane Kiffin is going to keep this program as one of the top in the country."
The key to New Orleans sits on a shelf in Kiffin's office. He received it after serving as a co-grand marshal to a Mardi Gras parade.
Next to the key is a Kiffin bobblehead in Tennessee gear, a reminder that he previously overcame an image-scalding exit.
One day after we discussed villains and heroes, rocking chairs discarded and keys acquired, and a decision that inflamed so many and scorched his image, Kiffin boarded a boat and fished waters off the Louisiana coast.
As fishing lines pierced the water, LSU's coach took in his surroundings.
"Louisiana, baby," Kiffin said, in a video he shared from the boat.
Outside of Louisiana, he's as hated as he's ever been, but the gap between villain and hero is as skinny as the state line.
This is the continuation of a multi-part series on Lane Kiffin at LSU. Check out other stories here , here , here and here .
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: Lane Kiffin chases villain to hero twist at LSU after Ole Miss exit
