Lane Kiffin dives into a highly anticipated, politically charged first season with No. 11 LSU

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — When Lane Kiffin glances up from his desk inside LSU’s training center, his eyes are drawn to a large, framed photo of him and his brother, Chris, celebrating on a sideline.

The image was captured at Mississippi’s Vaught Hemingway Stadium less than one year ago, moments after tight end Dae’Quan Wright’s first-down catch sealed a 24-19 victory over LSU.

Those who saw the game might recall Kiffin, moments after the catch, emphatically driving his clenched fist downward, as if pounding a final nail in the Tigers’ coffin.

LSU fans can’t wait to see Kiffin celebrate like that again.

Now that the fiery, outspoken, headline-grabbing coach is wearing LSU’s colors and logo on his visor, the Tigers are the talk of Louisiana and tickets at 102,000-seat Tiger Stadium are hard to get.

“When you hire a coach, that’s part of what you hire; you hire the energy that comes around it,” said Kiffin, whose Tigers open the 2026 season at home against Clemson on Sept. 5. “That pays off in fan support. It pays off in donations. It pays off in recruiting and players wanting to come.”

LSU faced political pressure to land Kiffin

The buzz surrounding the onset of the Kiffin era at LSU has been building ever since the dramatic, politically charged chain of events last fall that saw him jump in late November from College Football Playoff-bound Ole Miss to its SEC rival from neighboring Louisiana.

LSU fired coach Brian Kelly in October and had to buy out $54 million remaining on his contract. Then came an athletic department shake-up — driven by Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry and his appointees on the LSU Board of Supervisors — that forced out athletic director Scott Woodward and replaced him with Verge Ausberry.

Two days after Kiffin had coached Ole Miss to a victory over Mississippi State in the Egg Bowl, he abruptly left Oxford, Mississippi, flying on a private jet to Baton Rouge, where he signed a seven-year, $91 million contract with LSU.

“There’s a lot of people that have got a lot riding on this football season,” said political pundit and LSU graduate James Carville. “They’re tied to him; it’s pretty clear. They went out of their way to do this. And if it works, they’ll get some credit. And if it doesn’t, they’ll get blamed.”

The 51-year-old Kiffin said he’s been insulated from the hype because he spends most waking hours at LSU’s practice facility.

He shrugs off the focus on whether he can get LSU back into playoff contention.

“It doesn’t bother me,” Kiffin said. “The pressure and the expectations align with how I think. If we don’t win a lot of games, I’m in a really bad place about that, whether the fans are or not.”

Ticket demand surges, thanks to Kiffin and his roster

Kiffin will start feeling the fan frenzy up close when he takes part next week in a live radio show hosted by a bar, restaurant and pickleball establishment called Court to Table.

The 250 tickets available for the first show sold out in around 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, after 98% of LSU’s season tickets were renewed, there were 40,000 new ticket requests.

“We had to tell a lot of people, ‘No,’” said associate athletic director Brian Broussard, who oversees ticket sales.

Tickets in the 13,000-seat student section were gone five hours after being made available, as opposed to the usual three weeks.

“I’ve never seen that, and I’ve been here 30 years, through three national championships,” said Broussard, who also has felt the surge in enthusiasm personally.

His parents forward him requests from neighbors seeking help with tickets. His wife gets social media messages from people she hasn’t heard from since high school.

“People are just grasping,” Broussard said.

LSU second-year running back Harlem Berry, a New Orleans-area native, said that when he’s with friends or family, “everybody loves to talk about coach Kiffin and how this LSU offense is — how LSU is going to be this and that this year, and everybody’s excited to see it.”

Berry said he appreciated the stress Kiffin’s up-tempo offense puts on a defense last season when he saw LSU linebacker Whit Weeks “throwing up on the field” during the loss at Ole Miss.

Kiffin has replaced much of LSU’s offense with a transfer class ranked among the best in the country by recruiting analysts. The new arrivals include quarterback Sam Leavitt, as well as several former Ole Miss players.

“I know, as good as we are right now, this is just the beginning,” Kiffin said.

Kiffin brings a checkered past to his latest coaching job

Kiffin is now in his sixth head coaching job — all since 2007. He’s been fired from two of those (the NFL’s Raiders and Southern California), and spurned the fan bases of Tennessee and Ole Miss by leaving.

Along the way, fans were at times amused or turned off by the way he spoke his mind, particularly on social media, which he decided to quit — he won’t say for how long — last spring at the behest of his son, Knox.

Had Kiffin remained on social media, he said, he likely would have had “a field day” lashing back critics of his attempts to sign NFL rookies who’d recently won a court ruling granting them a fifth year of eligibility. Instead, he was looking forward to reviewing video of the day’s practice.

Kiffin says he’s enjoyed his social media silence and the time he’s gotten back to focus on work and family.

There was a time Kiffin believed he was misunderstood and let that bother him, he said, but not anymore.

“There’s too many variables to whether people are going to like you,” Kiffin said, noting that where some people see him as “cocky, brash or disrespectful,” others see him projecting confidence in a way that gives his teams swagger.

Leaving Ole Miss was awkward because he liked it there, and fans seemed to love him, until his sudden departure for LSU — of all places.

His daughter, Landry, who remains enrolled at Ole Miss, has since moved to Baton Rouge and is finishing her degree online.

“I don’t like that for her, that she didn’t get the everyday experience there, but it’s just how she felt,” Kiffin said.

The flip side is that after having Landry nearby for the past several years in Oxford, he didn’t have to give that up by moving away.

Knox also is in Baton Rouge, playing high school football and periodically hanging out in his father’s office.

Now Kiffin needs to win, which won’t be easy this season, given a schedule that includes five SEC teams ranked in the preseason AP Top 25: No. 9 Ole Miss, No. 8 Texas A&M, No. 5 Texas, No. 13 Alabama and No. 20 Tennessee.

Perhaps no game is bigger than the one at Ole Miss on Sept. 19, where boos are bound to rain down and security will be tight.

But Kiffin accepts that now as part of the life he’s chosen.

“I’ve learned to love my story. I embrace the firings, the six jobs, how it all went, because I know now sitting here I’m in such a better position to be a head coach at LSU,” Kiffin said. “I’m in a growth mindset. That’s how I live daily. I look at things differently than I did a month ago. I’m never accepting of just doing something the way it was done before.”

He’ll continue evolving at LSU, for better or worse. Either way, it’ll be a spectacle.

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AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-football-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-football