Every college football season has its heroes and villains. But this year, the sport’s big bad has shown itself early. We’re only in week two, and it’s already settled: it’s Lane Kiffin and the LSU Tigers.
The same Lane Kiffin who spent six seasons turning Ole Miss into a genuine 11-1 power, then left on the eve of the school’s first College Football Playoff for Baton Rouge. And the same LSU that tried to wriggle out of the $54 million it owed Brian Kelly for firing him, only to turn around and guarantee Kiffin a buyout north of $70 million.
The same Lane Kiffin whose program is accused of coaxing former players into suing to regain their eligibility. And the same LSU that enabled the campaign so thoroughly that the SEC threatened to throw one of its founding members out of the conference altogether.
And the same Lane Kiffin and LSU Tigers that Louisiana Tech finds itself traveling to this week. But while Tech and LSU share a long, well-documented, and thoroughly one-sided history, Kiffin and Louisiana Tech are not strangers either.
Let’s rewind to January 2010. Kiffin had just finished his first season as the head coach at Tennessee. And it was a year he’d made memorable for all the wrong reasons.
At a signing-day breakfast he accused Florida’s Urban Meyer of cheating, earned a public reprimand from the SEC, and had to apologize the same day. His staff piled up recruiting violations and the program landed in the middle of a recruiting-hostess scandal.
The villain act, in other words, was already fully operational.
Then, late on the night of January 12, he called a hasty team meeting, announced he was leaving to take the USC job, and was gone. Tennessee students were so incensed they poured into the streets and set mattresses on fire outside the athletic complex.
Tennessee needed a new coach immediately, and needed one who was, in every possible way, the opposite of Kiffin: someone buttoned-up, respectful of tradition, and unlikely to bolt in the night. Three days later, on January 15, they found their guy.
His name was Derek Dooley, and he was, at the time, both Louisiana Tech’s head football coach and its athletic director. He was also coming off a 4-8 season with his three years in Ruston having produced a total of 17 wins and 20 losses. Tennessee, cleaning up the mess Kiffin left behind, hired the man with a career losing record. Because at least he wasn’t Lane Kiffin.
So the very first time Kiffin blew up a job, the shrapnel landed in Ruston. Tech lost its coach and its AD in one stroke, but it was possibly the best thing that could have happened to Tech.
Tech replaced Dooley with a little-known Arizona offensive coordinator named Sonny Dykes. In 2011, after a 1-4 start, the Bulldogs ripped off seven straight wins to close the regular season, won the WAC, their first conference title in a decade, and went bowling. The next year, 2012, Tech went 9-3, climbing as high as #18 in the national rankings with road wins over Illinois, Houston, and Virginia.
Meanwhile, up in Knoxville, Dooley went 15-21, never posted a winning season, and was fired in 2012.
But Louisiana Tech has also already lined up across from a Lane Kiffin coached team.
The first meeting came in 2017, when Kiffin had reinvented himself as the head coach at Florida Atlantic after spending time at Alabama under Nick Saban. He brought the Owls to Ruston that November and won 48-23, on his way to an 11-3 season and a Conference USA championship.
But the rematch, in 2018, went differently. Tech traveled down to Boca Raton and beat Kiffin’s Owls on their own field that they like to remind everyone is only 1.8 miles from the beach. The loss snapped FAU’s 10-game home winning streak and effectively ended their bid to repeat as conference champs.
And Kiffin, being Kiffin, handled it with his trademark grace. “We killed ourselves,” he told reporters afterward. “No disrespect to them. They played hard, they won the game, but it’s just ridiculous, you know, the things we do.” Meaning Tech didn’t beat FAU so much as FAU lost to itself. Even in defeat, the man could not bring himself to hand over the credit.
Which brings us to Saturday. It’s the 22nd time Louisiana Tech and LSU have met on a football field, and the first time Tech will face Lane Kiffin himself wearing purple and gold. The main character of college football, fresh off a week that included a federal lawsuit and a governor’s grievance, is standing on the LSU sideline. And Tech has survived a Kiffin plot twist before.
Beating him Saturday would take a small miracle. But in the Lane Kiffin Cinematic Universe, maybe this time Louisiana Tech can be the superdog Krypto that takes down Lex Luthor.