The 2025 LSU football season had so much promise, but ended up being a disaster. Brian Kelly was fired, but the Tigers made the best hire of the offseason by prying Lane Kiffin away from Ole Miss. The move was the biggest of the offseason and has not been without scrutiny. The Rebels are in the middle of a College Football Playoff run, and Kiffin still decided to leave the Rebels.

Legendary college football coach and now analyst, Nick Saban, was on Friday's episode of “The Pat McAfee Show” and talked about everything that happened with Kiffin's decision and why he would leave Ole Miss for LSU in the first place. Saban had left a few jobs before Alabama and tried to relate to the decision he had in front of him.

Saban said, “One thing about this that people probably don’t see from maybe the perspective. I think sometimes as a coach you think of, you said it, you build something. You build a program. Alright so you take over a program that’s not so good. Whether it’s Michigan State, LSU, wherever I basically went, Alabama. And you build it. Well once you build it and you have success what’s the next challenge. So that was the hard thing for me.”
One thing Saban also said about the Tigers was that he relates to Kiffin in that they are trying to find a place where you can tell it's enough and you can sustain the success, which, in his eyes, is much more complicated than building that success up.
“When do you get to the place in your life where it’s enough,” Saban said. “And you can just say okay every year is just like a new job, I’m going to try to sustain the success here. Which is much more difficult than building it to start with.”
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Kiffin also said that he talked to Nick Saban about the move and sought his advice. Kiffin named Saban and Pete Carroll as two of the idols that he spoke to, and they both said he would be crazy not to take the job at LSU.
“I don’t make anybody’s decision for them,” Saban said. “I just try to offer the best advice that I can, relative to them being able to accomplish what they want to accomplish.”
Now, Kiffin is the LSU football coach and has a chance to make the Tigers a national title competitor from the jump, and if that happens, then he will look like a genius.