Lane Kiffin has a big decision to make, and reportedly, he's pretty close to making it.

Nearing the end of his sixth season as Ole Miss head football coach, Kiffin has successfully rehabilitated his image after a pair of embarrassing firings and a pair of abrupt departures that negatively affected his reputation. With a successful stint at Florida Atlantic and with a 55-19 overall record and 32-17 SEC mark in six years at Ole Miss, Kiffin has gone from outcast to the premier candidate for every major college football coaching vacancy this season. But none, according to reports, have been more attractive than LSU.

While Florida was initially among the frontrunners to land Kiffin, the Gators have apparently shifted their focus amid erratic communication between themselves and Kiffin, leaving the Tigers and Rebels to fight each other for the right to call Kiffin their head coach.

It's a difficult choice to make, it would seem, but if offered the same deal, it would be a much better decision for Kiffin to stay where he is.

To be clear, the allure of LSU is obvious: the three Tiger head coaches before Brian Kelly each won a national championship in Baton Rouge, thanks, in large part, to the stranglehold the program has long had on in-state prospects as the only major program in Louisiana. Additionally, even in the down years, LSU is typically what most teams would consider ‘good'; Les Miles was fired despite never winning fewer than eight games in a season, and Kelly, who won 10 games twice and nine games last year, had led the Tigers to a 5-3 record this season before being ousted.

Can Kiffin do better than that? Maybe. But is it a sure thing? Definitely not.

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LSU is undoubtedly one of the most successful college football programs of the 21st century. However, almost all of that success is from a much different era in the sport: the pre-NIL era. And while there's no reason to believe LSU can't go toe to toe monetarily, it has proven far more difficult for top programs to stay at the top as emphatically or for as long as they had become accustomed to, which only frustrates their fanbases, boosters, and administrators.

Meanwhile, Kiffin has built a contender out of Ole Miss, a traditionally mediocre program that has never hurt for money — only wins. Before Kiffin's arrival in 2020, the Rebels had won 10 or more games just three times since 1962, when the university integrated. In six seasons in Oxford, Kiffin has led Ole Miss to 10 or more wins three times, including this season, in which the Rebels are all but confirmed for their first College Football Playoff (CFP) berth and, depending on whether Auburn can upset Alabama tonight, could be making their first SEC Championship Game appearance as well.

That isn't to say that Kiffin should settle for less; on the contrary, leaving Ole Miss for LSU would be, in the short term at least, settling for less.

LSU can and likely will become a championship contender again. But that could take a while, and Kiffin, who was fired by both the Oakland Raiders and USC at one point in time, already has a championship contender in the Rebels, who beat then-fourth-ranked LSU in September and will host a first-round CFP game next month. Additionally, Ole Miss has made it clear it is more than willing to pay Kiffin a ton of money, considering, at $9 million per year, he was already the 10th-highest paid head coach in the country coming into the season, according to USA Today, despite being the only coach without even so much as a power-conference title in his career.

Kiffin, who may always be seen as lesser than the likes of Nick Saban or Charles McClendon at LSU, has the chance to establish himself as potentially the greatest coach in Ole Miss history, even better than Johnny Vaught, after whom the Rebels' football stadium is partially named. But the truth is, Kiffin has never proven able to stop himself from chasing the bright lights, and Death Valley's lights seem plenty bright enough for Kiffin despite having already found a home in Oxford.