At halftime of Saturday night’s 51-10 blowout win over Clemson, when LSU won 31-3, Tigers coach Lane Kiffin capped an on-field interview by saying, “Imagine if we had pro players.”
After the game, Kiffin was asked about his halftime wisecrack.
“What’s the difference?” Kiffin said. “Everybody hates you. They can’t hate you that much more. So there you go. You got another line.”
Kiffin took comfort in the fact that the NFL transfer storyline didn’t loom over the outcome of the game.
“I’m just really glad they played the way they did, so that wouldn’t have been the story,” Kiffin said. “Because I get it . . . even if we won close and kind of ugly, the whole story would have been, ‘Man, I screwed the team up by doing this.’ And I said this morning, ‘You can not agree with it. I’ve been criticized heavily for the last two weeks saying I did that.’ . . . But my job is not to please you and worry about what you’re going to write. My job is what I believe is right, and I believe we’re fighting for what was right for those kids.
“I’m not going to get into all the reasons, but that’s what I believe. And so many people don’t like that, but they don’t understand that.”
Still, Kiffin knew or should have known that his effort to bring back players with NFL offseason and preseason experience would have sparked a backlash, especially at a time when the powers-that-be are looking for anything they can use to get Congress to clean up the mess that has flowed directly from the implosion of decades of antitrust violations.
They’ve been huffing and puffing about “pro players” returning to college football, while ignoring the fact that college football players have become pro players. They’ve been glossing over the fact that Nick Saban once brought an NFL free agent (Trent Richardson) back to campus to practice against college players. And they’ve been sinking their teeth into the disingenuous notion that the returning pro players will displace current players, ignoring the basic reality that current players get displaced all the time, by transfers and other incoming recruits.
Yes, he may be naturally inclined to wear a black hat. Or maybe he’s just not afraid to do what’s right for his team, even if the strategy plays directly into the hands of those who hope to parlay the current chaos into an antitrust exemption that allows player income to be restricted and player mobility to be limited.
Some regard LSU coach Lane Kiffin as an agent of chaos. The better explanation is that he’s a garden-variety troll.
At halftime of Saturday night’s weather-delayed game against Clemson, Kiffin was interviewed by ESPN’s Holly Rowe. After the interview ended, Kiffin started to walk away before circling back to the microphone and saying, “Imagine if we had pro players.”
It was a hilarious reference to the elephant that has resided in the room for the past several weeks. Kiffin has been trying to add players who should have been eligible for another season, and who pursued NFL careers until their right to one more college season was recognized by the courts. It has sparked outcries from many that “professional” players should be excluded from college football — which ignores the reality that college players are now professional players.
Without the two players that LSU decided not to add to the roster for the opening game, given the possibility that the SEC could retaliate by kicking them out of the conference, Kiffin and company are still manhandling Clemson.
LSU opted against putting former NFL players Dae’Quan Wright and Zxavian Harris on their roster for Saturday’s game against Clemson on Friday night and that decision pushed pause on the collision between the school and the Southeastern Conference about their desire to have the players on the field this season.
The SEC is opposed to member schools having players who have spent time in the NFL on the roster, but a preliminary injunction in Louisiana barred the conference or the NCAA for penalizing any school that put them on the field. The conference has filed a federal lawsuit to prevent those players from playing and LSU’s head coach Lane Kiffin cited “the uncertainties of what could come” as the reason for the decision to keep Wright and Harris off the field during an appearance on ESPN on Saturday morning.
Kiffin said that he believes that decision was in the “best interest” of the school, but the players could still be added to the roster at a later date so there’s no sign that this is the end of the road. Matt Hayes of USA Today quoted a source saying that they were “not sure LSU would still be a member” of the SEC if the rest of the conference’s schools had voted on Friday and ESPN analyst Paul Finebaum suggested the same on air on Saturday.
Attorney Ryan Downton, who represents Wright and Harris, said in a statement, via Pete Thamel of ESPN, that LSU made a “measured decision” and that “everyone should use that space to lower the temperature and look at the facts” around the case. Downton went on to make the case by noting neither player made a roster or played in a preseason game and closed the statement by hoping that “level heads prevail.”
Little about the process thus far suggests that will be the case and the ongoing court cases mean that there’s likely a lot more to come in the fight that has taken center stage in college football as the 2026 season gets underway.
Nick Saban coached the Dolphins from 2005 through 2006. Lane Kiffin coached the Raiders from 2007 until early in the 2008 season. In 2014, Saban hired Kiffin.
And it ended roughly as well for Kiffin in Tuscaloosa as it ended for him in Oakland.
Vanity Fair has published an excerpt of John Talty’s new book about Kiffin — Lane Being Lane: The Story of Lane Kiffin, College Football’s Agent of Chaos — and it is, above all else, an entertaining reflection on Lane’s time with the ultimate my-way-or-the-highway head coach.
Kiffin, per the book, had a habit of on-campus carousing: “‘You’ve got to keep Lane away from the girls that are in college,’ Saban said, according to one former coach. ‘Just keep him away from the sorority girls. Make sure they’ve graduated college or are working a job.’”
Kiffin reportedly had an alias that he used when chasing co-eds. It was, per the book, “Joey Freshwater.”
While the off-field escapades didn’t enhance their relationship, Saban decided to move on from Kiffin after watching the film of Alabama’s 24-7 win over Washington, which earned a berth in the 2016 national championship.
“As Saban spent hours rewatching the game film, what he saw disturbed him,” Talty writes. “Kiffin had called plays the team hadn’t practiced. It wasn’t the first time he had done that — it was almost like a party trick for Kiffin to draw something up during a game — but the savant playmaker was off his game.”
Kiffin had taken the head-coaching job at Florida Atlantic, but he was staying at Alabama through the postseason. Saban decided to pull the plug on that approach, referring to Kiffin with a colorful and profane three-syllable term. From the book: “‘How do we score twenty-four points against Washington when they suck?’ Saban told a confidant. ‘He’s obviously thinking about FAU and he’s not thinking about us.’”
As Kiffin thinks about his new job at LSU, where Saban coached before heading to the NFL, Talty’s book looks to contain plenty of nuggets that could become fodder for a variety of probing questions for Kiffin — questions that could elicit some memorable answers.
As a time when Lane Kiffin is ready to pounce on as many former NFL players as he can, a former USC colleague of Kiffin’s has a far different viewpoint.
“The fact that somebody out there is going to take a player off of an NFL roster and tell somebody who’s been doing it for nine months to go kick rocks, that doesn’t sit well with me,” Texas coach Steve Sarkisian said Monday, via David Eckert of 247sports.com. “I think that’s wrong. That, morally, is wrong.”
It’s hardly uncommon, especially in the NFL. On Monday, players who spent the entire offseason, training camp, and preseason in the building will lose their brand-new roster spots to newcomers claimed on waivers or signed as free agents.
The dynamic has become relevant in college football, for this year only, because of the NCAA’s new five-year rule. The NCAA didn’t realize, or didn’t care, that the change would unlock an effort by players who had only four years at the college level to get another season.
All due respect to Sarkisian, but football coaches will say whatever it takes to justify whatever they want. Sarkisian, like Oregon’s Dan Lanning, doesn’t want any of the available former NFL players. that makes it easier for them to get on a soapbox when it comes to embracing players who were released by their NFL teams.
