BATON ROUGE, La. — The best deals are done in an airport hangar.
That was the case with this one.
Picture it: LSU administrators unloading from a private jet after LSU’s game at Oklahoma on Saturday and their phones buzzing with a familiar name on the other end.
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Jimmy Sexton.
Lane Kiffin’s agent was reaching out, but with no service during the 90-minute flight, athletic director Verge Ausberry and his executive team found themselves cut off from the world at a really, really bad time. The weeks-long target of its search, Lane Kiffin, had just emerged from a meeting with Ole Miss administrators, where — as we know now — he informed them of his intentions to leave.
After landing at the Baton Rouge airport, Ausberry and LSU officials scurried into a conference room within a private hangar owned by one of the university’s top donors. The room was so rarely used that the hangar owner himself told people he didn’t know it even existed.
And there, then and there only, is when weeks of confidence from those in Baton Rouge was put into writing. A good bit of nervousness on the bayou was eased.
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LSU solidified its courtship with Kiffin, landing this coaching cycle’s most-coveted catch by poaching the polarizing offensive savant from its chief conference rival.
Lane Kiffin is the new head coach at LSU after spending six seasons at Ole Miss. (Tyler Kaufman/Getty Images)
(Tyler Kaufman via Getty Images)
Roughly 36 hours later, after that meeting at the hangar, here in the club level of one of the country’s greatest football palaces, the man so many love to hate, the guy who uprooted himself and his family, who left a team competing in the College Football Playoff, accepted his sixth head coaching job to a roaring applause, a few “Geaux Tigers” chants and, even from Kiffin himself, in a fake Cajun accent.
As the 50-year-old coach spoke to more than 200 in attendance here, Kiffin’s face graced the Tiger Stadium jumbotron, a photoshopped LSU visor resting atop his head while wearing his trademark white hoodie.
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Though his tenure was just hours old, there was talk here of championships, of restoring LSU to the top of the college football world, of returning this place — night games at Tiger Stadium — into a death trap for opponents. Kiffin and officials here uttered the word “championships” no fewer than a dozen times.
In fact, Ausberry sold the job to Kiffin as a place you come to win it all. This isn’t about just winning games, he said. “He’s already done that,” Ausberry said, perhaps a slight jab at the school in Oxford. “We told him to come to LSU to win championships.”
And so did so many others.
You want to know why Kiffin would leave a team bound for the playoff? Because so many around him pointed to LSU as the best college football job in the country. Kiffin strongly hinted that the list of those who advised him to take the job includes a former LSU coach, Nick Saban, and ex-USC coach Pete Carroll — both former bosses and mentors.
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On the list, as well: perhaps Sexton himself.
All of them, in their own way, had the same message for Kiffin, he says: “You are going to regret it if you don’t take the job and go. It’s the best job in America with the best resources.”
Carroll even told Kiffin that his late father Monte would have told him to head to Baton Rouge: “Take the shot.”
He only really realized the magnitude of LSU football when he landed to a large group of top donors, political figures and school executives awaiting his arrival at that airport hangar on Sunday, a day after the deal was struck. There before him was the power of Louisiana, he said. He felt it. He saw it.
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While a poor and low-populated state compared to so many others, Louisiana’s organic football passion, its oil and seafood industry resources, its drive and motivations seem directed into the LSU football program.
Cliché or not, they’ve gone “all in on Lane,” as one person put it here.
How?
A contract paying him $13 million annually (80% of his $91 million is guaranteed). A roster budget expected to exceed $25 million (from a plethora of big-spending donors). A staff salary pool that includes millions in buyout money to be paid to Ole Miss. And, as it turns out, an agreement from LSU to pay Kiffin his postseason bonus money based on Ole Miss’ success in the College Football Playoff.
Clearly, there is money here. Lots of it.
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They’re spending it too. This very month, LSU will pay three head football coaches. The school’s final buyout payment to the fired Ed Orgeron ($426,000) is due in a couple of weeks. A near $800,000 payment is due to the fired Brian Kelly at the end of the month (monthly for six years). And Kiffin’s first payment — more than $1 million — is coming, too.
“We have all of the resources in place to restore a championship culture right here in Tiger Stadium,” says the school’s new president, Wade Rousse.
Absent from the introductory news conference was Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, choosing instead to take a more backseat approach after comments six weeks ago that rattled some. Despite his public criticism of high-priced coaching contracts, the state’s top-elected official blessed Kiffin’s deal.
Over the last few weeks, Landry even got on the phone with Kiffin, along with top-level donors who are promising millions in annual NIL deals for his roster. It’s the most important thing for Kiffin.
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In fact, during negotiations with LSU, Kiffin wasn’t as concerned with his pay, he says, as his roster. He kept asking Sexton what are the “numbers and plan for the players.”
In the end, it was more than good enough. LSU is expected to distribute around $13-15 million in revenue-share to the roster plus at least $10 million more in over-the-cap NIL — something that must pass through the new NIL Go clearinghouse.
“This was the best setup,” Kiffin said of all his offers (LSU, Ole Miss, Florida and a fourth mystery school). “I don’t care what your system is. Without players, it doesn’t work.”
As he spoke, the 1,000-pound, unignorable Rebel of a gorilla hung in the room.
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Let’s face it: Kiffin made a decision that few coaches would have. He left a playoff team, with a real shot to win a national championship, to come to a program that he thought would give him a better chance to win a … national championship. He took a half-dozen coaching staff members, too, each of them deciding to board two jets on Sunday that LSU flew to Oxford, leaving in the dust a group of players on an 11-1 team ranked No. 7 in the country.
Kiffin described it as an incredibly difficult decision and one he tried to avoid. He said he lobbied for hours Saturday to coach in the playoff night at a meeting with athletic director Keith Carter and UM chancellor Glenn Boyce, and then again Sunday morning, to no avail.
Kiffin says he hopes “time heals wounds.” He hopes Ole Miss fans remember a great six years, a stretch he called the “best” of his life.
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“In a lot of ways, [Sunday] sucked for a lot of people,” he said.
On the way to the airport to board the flights to Baton Rouge, Ole Miss fans attempted to “run” him off the road, he claims. His clothes, on a rolling hanger, were moved into the football facility’s parking lot. And he wasn’t allowed to speak to the team to say goodbye.
He understands it all, he says. It’s passion. It’s the SEC. That’s how it is.
“I’m not upset,” he says. “I think people get really upset when you leave because they feel hurt because you’re doing a really good job.”
As bad as Sunday was, next season will be worse.
Next fall, its date yet to be announced, the Tigers are scheduled to play in Oxford.
