It was the saga that defined the end of Ole Miss’ 2022 college football season.
With his name pegged to Auburn’s vacancy, Lane Kiffin “struggled” with how fans reacted as he weighed the pros and cons between a jump to the Tigers and his current job with the Rebels, he told ESPN on Friday.
That made it difficult for Kiffin — even though he felt that he took the proper approach.
“We screw up all the time,” he told ESPN. “But when you think you’re doing the right thing and then you’re really criticized for it — especially by your own people — I struggled with that because I feel like I went through a decision-making process that you’re supposed to go through.”
In late November, just three days before Ole Miss concluded the regular season against Mississippi State, WCBI News reported Kiffin was expected to step down as head coach and take the same position at Auburn following the regular season.
About an hour later, the 47-year-old Kiffin responded by tweeting a photo of him reading “The Egg Bowl: Mississippi State vs. Ole Miss” and captioning the image with, “Just doing some late night reading @OleMissFB.”
It didn’t provide any clarity on the situation, but Kiffin quote-tweeted the WCBI News reporter’s tweet later that night and said, in part, “That’s news to me Jon.”
Kiffin was right.
That move to Auburn never happened.
The Tigers, which had fired Bryan Harsin, opted to hire Hugh Freeze from Liberty.
Kiffin told his Ole Miss team that he planned to stay the night before their game against Mississippi State, per ESPN, and a long-term contract extension was announced the following week.
He didn’t plan to reveal his intentions until after the season, feeling that it would’ve flipped the discussion and made it about him — the program’s coach since 2020 — before such a pivotal rivalry game.
But “sometimes the right thing to do doesn’t always go right in areas,” Kiffin told ESPN, and he felt that was the case because Ole Miss lost to Mississippi State.
After a 5-5 start in his first season with the Rebels, they went 18-8 across 2021 and 2022, losing in both bowl games but returning to the AP top 10.
Before becoming the coach at Ole Miss, Kiffin spent three years at Florida Atlantic, four years at USC and one at Tennessee as head coach, with a stint as Alabama’s offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach mixed in.