The LSU Tigers grabbed all the possible headlines late in last college football season when they swiped Lane Kiffin from Ole Miss, taking him away to be their head coach even while the Rebels were in the College Football Playoff.
A move like that begins with the highest of expectations. The pursuit doesn’t go down like that without raising the bar considerably.
The bar is already high at Louisiana State University on the gridiron, and Kiffin came to town with the expectation of reaching the greatest of heights.
Of course, Kiffin hasn’t always seemed capable of doing that, and that’s the concern now after a one-sided loss to Alabama on Saturday.
It was actually a close game that LSU led at one point, but then Alabama closed forcefully and the Tigers had no answer.
So what to make of Kiffin? That’s the question everyone is going to start to ask.
Lane Kiffin Reality Check
The question that The Athletic’s Matt Baker asks about Kiffin in a new article this week is a fair one: “Is this all Lane Kiffin is?”
LSU hired Kiffin in hopes that he’d reach his full ceiling in Baton Rouge. The problem might be that his ceiling has already been determined.
“In his four previous college head coaching jobs, Kiffin generally did well when expectations were low (Florida Atlantic, Ole Miss) and struggled when they were high (USC, 2024 Ole Miss),” Baker writes. “Expectations are always high at LSU, and losing all three of his toughest games (Ole Miss, Kentucky, Alabama) means he isn’t meeting them — or, more charitably, hasn’t met them yet. It’s only Year 1, and he has chances for proof-of-concept victories coming against Texas and Tennessee. But the gut-reaction fear after the loss to Alabama is that Kiffin’s LSU tenure won’t look much different than his USC tenure.”
LSU won’t move on from Kiffin anytime soon, but he has to prove himself when the toughest tests arrive. So far with the Tigers, he hasn’t.
LSU Schedule
LSU’s next two games will be challenging.
First, they host Texas, and then they go to Tennessee, two ranked SEC foes.
LSU closes against lowly Arkansas in a game the Tigers will expect to win. But the amount of excitement LSU takes into the final week of the regular season will depend on what they can do in these next two games.
LSU Gets Harsh Lane Kiffin Reality Check