Lane Kiffin is going into his fifth season as the head coach at Ole Miss.
Of all the stops throughout Kiffin’s entertaining career, this season represents his longest stint with any team. He’s 49 years old, been a head coach since he was 31 and the SEC’s merry prankster has never had a better chance to win it all than right now.
Is this the season Ole Miss finally breaks through to the SEC championship game? Kiffin has felt this pressure before — at Oakland, Tennessee and Southern Cal — and fallen flat every time.
Get your popcorn ready.
Kiffin’s side-show antics have never made things easy on his players. I’m wondering if Kiffin tries to tone it down this season now that he knows he has a shot to make the playoffs. Hopefully not, but Kiffin seems more cautious with his words these days.
He’s already feeling the pressure and says he’s addressing it with his team.
“I do talk about it extensively to players because I think that does come at them non stop nowadays because of phones,” Kiffin said last week to reporters. “And, so, yeah. That’s a big concern of mine and we talk about it all the time…now there’s more of it than we’ve ever had here, for sure, with the preseason rankings and the position rankings or with mock-draft things and we’re supposed to have this many people drafted, which is way more than we’ve ever had.
“It’s a lot to guard against.”
I’ve always liked Kiffin, even though I had to give him the business last season after his loss to Alabama and before his game against Auburn. But who are we kidding? He enjoys the banter, and at this point he’s pretty much the league’s only colorful personality with any staying power.
