Lane Kiffin is no longer the head coach at Ole Miss but he’s still financially benefitting from the team’s success.
The new LSU coach congratulated his former team on its 41-10 win over Tulane in the first round of the College Football Playoff on Saturday. The Rebels beat the Green Wave 45-10 in a Week 4 win with Kiffin on the sideline and nearly repeated that score under new coach Pete Golding.
The win netted Kiffin a cool $250,000 bonus too. And that’s a sum that isn’t paid by Ole Miss, either.
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Thanks to a clause in his contract with LSU, Kiffin’s new school is paying out any of the postseason bonuses he could have earned at Ole Miss. His contract with the Rebels said he’d get $250,000 for a playoff win. So LSU is on the hook for that amount.
It’s an odd clause but there wasn’t much that wasn’t odd about the Kiffin saga at the end of the college football season. Despite Ole Miss barreling toward the College Football Playoff, LSU successfully wooed Kiffin away from Oxford and to Baton Rouge.
Kiffin contended that he wanted to coach the Rebels in the playoff even after agreeing to move to LSU in 2026. But Ole Miss wasn’t having any of that. Those discussions ostensibly drug out Kiffin’s decision, as Ole Miss officially named Golding Kiffin’s successor before LSU announced that Kiffin would be the school’s new football coach.
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If Ole Miss takes down Georgia in the Sugar Bowl on Jan. 1, Kiffin will make even more money. A quarterfinal win would have been worth $500,000 on his Ole Miss deal. Will he be in attendance for that game? New Orleans is a short drive from Baton Rouge.
