1 of 1- catfishboy
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Ole Miss makes power move with Lane Kiffin hire, and proves ...
Ole Miss makes power move with Lane Kiffin hire, and proves it is not afraid to take risks
OXFORD — Less than a month into his tenure as the athletic director at Ole Miss, Keith Carter has made it clear that he's not afraid of making power moves.
For years, the criticism surrounding Ole Miss has been that the Rebels don't think big enough with their hires. Matt Luke was an offensive line coach here before he got promoted to head coach. Glenn Boyce was a consultant on the search committee for Ole Miss' chancellor before he was named chancellor. Even Carter was an internal candidate for his job.
But in hiring Lane Kiffin to be the next football coach at Ole Miss, Carter has shown he is willing to compete with the top competition in the SEC.
By record, Kiffin hasn't consistently proven to be a top-tier coach; he has a 35-21 record as the leader of Power 5 programs.
But by name, Ole Miss is making a splash.
Hiring a candidate like Memphis coach Mike Norvell or Louisiana coach Billy Napier surely could've been the right choice. But in his press conference last week, Carter said a major reason he fired former coach Matt Luke was fan apathy.
In hiring a lightning-rod candidate like Kiffin, Carter has guaranteed apathy won't be a problem.
Attention follows Kiffin. In the NFL, Kiffin was the youngest head coach in league history. At Tennessee, Kiffin left the program after one season and left NCAA sanctions in his wake. The beginning of his USC tenure included a 10-win season and a preseason No. 1 ranking. The end of his tenure with the Trojans left Kiffin fired at the airport five games into his fourth season at USC.
He followed that series of events with a three-year run working as Nick Saban's offensive coordinator at Alabama, revitalizing the Crimson Tide's offense and helping the team to three College Football Playoff berths and one national title.
Of course, Kiffin was relieved of his job as Alabama's offensive coordinator a week before the 2017 National Championship game. Alabama lost that game. More attention for Kiffin.
Since going to FAU, Kiffin has remained pretty quiet. Well, except on Twitter. He's criticized the Conference USA refs. He's trolled his former co-workers and players at Alabama. Less than two weeks ago, Kiffin sent a tweet with a crying-laughing emoji about Russian commentators reacting to the unsportsmanlike conduct penalty Ole Miss receiver Elijah Moore committed in the Egg Bowl.
And that's been Kiffin's last decade. It's hard to be apathetic about his divisive career.
But it's also hard to deny his success. His offenses thrived at Alabama. His FAU teams won two conference championships in three years. Even his USC team went 10-2 in a year where it wasn't bowl eligible.
There's no guarantee Kiffin's success will translate at Ole Miss. But if Carter's goal was to galvanize the fan base, there's no doubt hiring Kiffin can do that. He's a known commodity. He's got a big personality that might attract fans who stopped watching in the slowest moments of the Luke era. And he's never shied away from attention, which has the chance to elevate Ole Miss' program from afterthought in the SEC West to legitimate recruiting contender.
Within an hour of announcing the Kiffin hire, Ole Miss football tweeted a link to buy season tickets twice. The Kiffin hire is as much a marketing move as a football move, getting fans back to the program in the wake of the NCAA investigation and the underwhelming years of the Luke era.
It also establishes that Carter will take risks. Bringing in Kiffin isn't a safe hire. His reputation precedes him, he's left schools in the lurch in the past and his USC tenure didn't end anywhere near the way he wanted it to.
But taking risks is a huge departure from what Ole Miss has done in the past few years. Kiffin isn't a "good ol' boy" hire. He's an attempt to raise Ole Miss' stature from what it is to what long-standing fans believe it should be.
Whether the hire leads to SEC titles and New Year's Six bowls has yet to be seen. But in the short term, Carter has checked his first box.
People are going to care about Ole Miss.
SOURCE: Suss, Nick. "Ole Miss makes power move with Lane Kiffin hire, and proves it is not afraid to take risks." Mississippi Clarion Ledger, 7 December 2019,
Contact Nick Suss at 601-408-2674 or nsuss@gannett.com. Follow @nicksuss on Twitter.
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- zreb
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Re: Ole Miss makes power move with Lane Kiffin hire, and proves ...
Tubberville was the last hire I recall that worked out well till he departed for more $. That puts the odds against kinda CLK high BUT staying the last course definitely was NOT working. Win lose or draw, it shall be fun surely for awhile. As much as anything, it is a life changing opportunity for him and hopefully he can make the best of it for his family. He isn't exactly coming to a picnic in Oxford.
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- Rock1Aggie
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Re: Ole Miss makes power move with Lane Kiffin hire, and proves ...
These articles are always shallow and poorly written and lack so much context. He has never left any school in the "lurch" He left Tenn after 1 year to take over his dream job at the time where he had been the OC and won titles. Nobody in their right mind wouldnt have done the same.One year at Tenn took over a 5-7 crap hole Fulmer left and and won 7 games USC got slammed with NCAA penalties soon after he took the job from Pete Carroll. No bowl eligibility in his first year and the NCAA lost their minds and let all upcoming JR's and SR's transfer without having to sit out a year. Also let kids out of their letters of intent. They lost a ton of kid and recruits, played with only 70 scholarship players. Still he went 8-5. No Bowl game eligibility again the next year and no pac 12 title game ( that he won the south that year), coached his **** off and went 10-2. His 3rd year is when the world expected so much from them, but the guts had been cut our of the team with transfers and signees, the upperclassmen that stayed graduated in that second year and that team was void of a ton of talent, went 7-6 and anyone that really knew what that team had would have said that was a heck of a record. Started off the 4th season 3-2, was fired on the tarmack by Pat Freakin Hayden ,what a clown. Ed O went 6-2 with that team the rest of the way, no doubt in my mind Kiffin would have down that well also.