Pete Golding (Photo from Ole Miss Athletics)
- Lane Kiffin will not finish the Rebels’ Cinderella 11-1 season, opting instead to take the head coaching job at LSU, after the 7-5 Tigers fired Brian Kelly. Defensive Coordinator Pete Golding has been hired as Kiffin’s replacement.
For Ole Miss, it’s time to move on from the Kiffin spectacle. It was always going to end this way because that’s who Kiffin is — a man searching for the next big thing.
The most successful season in modern Ole Miss history continued with the Rebels’ dominant 38-19 win over Mississippi State Friday amid news that Lane Kiffin would announce his departure, or, many hoped, his renewed commitment to Ole Miss, on Saturday.
High drama ensued, and it was Sunday afternoon before Kiffin finally acknowledged his decision to take the LSU job in an X post. He took the opportunity to paint himself as a victim and take a parting shot at Ole Miss Athletic Director Keith Carter along the way. Kiffin claimed that Carter had refused his offer to finish out the playoffs despite “the team” supporting the move.
Kiffin’s parting letter was preceded by leaked news that Ole Miss had hired current Defensive Coordinator Pete Golding to lead the team, on a permanent basis, moving forward. Ole Miss has since confirmed the leak.
The need to move on from Kiffin was prompted, in part, by a need for stability heading into the College Football Playoffs, but also by a recruiting calendar that kicks off in earnest on Tuesday, December 2nd.
Still the news was slow moving for fans, a team and an administration agonizing over what would be next. When schools say an announcement is coming on a Saturday, as Ole Miss did prior to the Egg Bowl, we’re conditioned to expect such news in the morning. ESPN was at the ready, their Marty Smith of the network’s Marty and McGee Show was in Oxford.
Smith breathlessly reported Kiffin’s Saturday schedule. Family yoga. Then prepping for a potential SEC Championship game appearance against Georgia, one that Alabama made sure never materialized. Then a delayed meeting with Carter to spill the beans on his future plans.
Afternoon drug into evening. There were photos of cars outside the home of Chancellor Glenn Boyce, where the meeting occurred. There were reports of Kiffin threatening to deplete the Rebels’ roster, taking its stars with him, unless his demand of coaching the team through its playoff run were met.
So many in the media were pushing the idea of Kiffin coaching the team in the playoffs. That’s crazy. If he was willing to use poaching players now, as a threat to force his grand scheme of having his cake and eating it too, he’d surely have done the same thing over the next month, working to convince players to follow him to LSU.
All signs pointed to the Ole Miss-Kiffin break-up, if not the high drama. Yet weekend hot takes that Kiffin would remain at Ole Miss were plentiful, but for what?
The spectacle of the last few weeks had him burning through the capital of his fans’ good will. Clearly, he was welcome to stay and coach the Rebels in 2026, but he was tearing up his fan base.
You could see that in public comments. Donors and “friends of the program” rarely make public comments, but there’s no doubt he was tearing up that base too.
To what, pray tell, would Kiffin have returned? Certainly not the autonomy he enjoyed, not the
relationship with an administration that would give him whatever he wanted.
Carter and Company would certainly been on guard trying to prevent the whole scenario from playing out again in 2026.
For the second time in three years Ole Miss fans were subjected to a very public courtship of the coach they knew had done more than any other to restore the Rebels’ to the national prominence of John Vaught’s teams in the ’50s and ’60s.
It’s the status the administration and fans have sought since those glory days, and for that, you’ll overlook a lot of things.
Kiffin was 55-19 at Ole Miss. In the last five seasons, he’s won 10 games twice and 11 games twice, including this year’s record within the regular season. This team could still reach 12 or more wins.
But this year’s spectacle was Kiffin’s 2022 Auburn romance on steroids.
The reality is that Kiffin, a career wanderer, had been at Ole Miss longer than anyone thought he would be when he was hired in December of 2019.
By staying six seasons, he ties David Cutcliffe as the second-longest tenured Ole Miss coach since Vaught. Only Billy Brewer coached the Rebels longer in that same window.
Listening to Kiffin back at SEC Media Days you might have thought the coach and his town were one of the sport’s great love affairs.
Then, Kiffin went into great detail about what Oxford meant to him late in his parents’ lives.
“It’s just been an amazing experience. I just have — I’m not saying this because I’m the head coach. I don’t give you coach-speak. The people of Oxford, when you lose your parents and you see how they are and how they helped take care of them towards the end or how much they really cared about them, it just opened my eyes to a totally different way,” he said. “I owe so much to Oxford and the people there. It’s just been awesome.”
He doesn’t owe a lifetime commitment, and business is business, but he could have managed the spectacle differently as available coaches like James Franklin came off the board. Florida, weeks ago a chief Kiffin suitor, seems poised to hire Tulane’s Jon Sumrall, according to reports. Both, and others, could have been higher profile replacements. They were off the board by time Kiffin got around to telling Ole Miss what almost every insider suspected.
Even with hurt feelings, and as Ole Miss looks ahead to its next chapter, it can look back at the Kiffin Era as a huge net gain.
Kiffin took a quarterback who couldn’t hold the starting job and made him an NFL draft pick. Matt Corral’s replacement transferred in, and Kiffin did the same thing for Jaxson Dart. This season he’s taken a Division II quarterback and led Ole Miss to the playoffs.
And the Rebels aren’t just barely in the playoffs. It’s not wake up on Selection Sunday and hope for the best. When the playoffs were reserved for the top four, Kiffin’s Rebels played in the Sugar and Peach Bowls, dominating Penn State in the latter two years ago.
Kiffin has proven what a good coach can do with the support the school’s committed and organized administration is willing to provide.
When the rules changed, Ole Miss surveyed the landscape and adjusted. It has thrived with the Grove Collective and Kiffin’s deft handling of the Transfer Portal.
Now Carter and the Rebels must pick up the pieces and pivot.
In Golding, Ole Miss appears to be trading annual postseason volatility for stability. Golding grew up in Hammond, La., played at Delta State and gained famed professionally as Nick Saban’s defensive coordinator from 2018-2022 before Kiffin hired him in 2023.
He appears comfortable with working in the Southeast, having spent all of his coaching career – except for two seasons in San Antonio – in Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi or Alabama. He was defensive backs coach at Southern Miss from 2014-2015.
How closely Golding, 41, in his first head coaching job, can mirror the Rebels’ success under Kiffin we’ll learn in time.
