The 2025 LSU football season quickly went from promise to disaster. Brian Kelly was fired mid-season, and the focus of LSU's coaching search quickly turned to Lane Kiffin. Ole Miss was in the middle of a College Football Playoff run, with the Rebels only losing one game. Now, the Rebels don't have their coach for the run, and it speaks to how Kiffin views each job's chances of winning a national title.

ESPN college football analyst Paul Finebaum said on “The Matt Barrie Show” that he thinks that Kiffin would have stayed with Ole Miss if he believed that the Rebels had a chance to win the national title. Finebaum said he would have waited because of that. At the end of the day, LSU is the better job, and Kiffin took the Tigers' job because of that.

“I think Lane Kiffin had to do the math, Finebaum said. “He looked at his team, very good, one loss and it was barely a loss because they had the lead against Georgia and I think, this is just my thought, he looked at the College Football Playoff pool and he said we could get maybe a game or two in, but I think Lane Kiffin in his estimation, he was probably not going to win the title because if you thought you had a real shot to win the College Football Playoff title you would wait.”
Finebaum also noted that this further hurts Lane Kiffin's reputation, given that he tried extremely hard to fix it. He had a history of bolting from one job to another in the span of one or two years.
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“He’s also undoing in my mind, years and years of work to rebuild a tarnished reputation,” Finebaum explained. “And I mean we’ve all dealt with people that don’t like Lane Kiffin. Tennessee fans never let him forget that he walked out. By the way, for a better job, USC at the time was better than Tennessee, probably isn’t anymore. But in 2010 or 2011 when 2010, when he left.”
After stops with the Raiders, Tennessee, and USC, Kiffin rehabilitated his image with Alabama under Nick Saban. Then, he found success at Florida Atlantic before Ole Miss came calling.
Kiffin may have matured, but what happened with Kiffin and Ole Miss before he went to LSU proves that the coaching business is tricky, and there are questions about whether Kiffin really has changed that much. LSU is one of the best jobs in the country, but this should prove to the Tigers that they should be wary of Kiffin and the drama that follows him.