Lane Kiffin Recalls ‘Mentor’ Pete Carroll’s Fatherly Advice on Picking LSU Over Ole Miss

After weeks of speculation and rumors, Lane Kiffin has finally announced that he is taking his talents down to the bayous of Louisiana to become the new head coach of the LSU Tigers. Kiffin announced that he is ending his six-season-long stint with the Ole Miss Rebels via a post on X.

Kiffin will leave the Rebels with an 11-1 record and a viable path to the national championship. His contract with the Tigers will reportedly be $12 to $13 million per year for the next seven years.

That deal will make Kiffin one of, if not the, highest-paid coaches in the history of college football. According to the man, however, it wasn’t the dollars that lured him to Baton Rouge, but rather the advice of his mentor and Super Bowl-winning head coach, Pete Carroll.

During an exclusive interview with ESPN’s Marty Smith, Smith said, “I talked to some mentors, Coach Carroll and Coach Saban. Coach Carroll said, ‘Your dad would tell you to go, man. Take the shot. You’ve accomplished a lot here.'”

As things stand, the Rebels will have to make it in the playoffs without Kiffin. The program’s athletic director, Keith Carter, denied the coach’s request to finish out the season as the head coach of Ole Miss. The program has, instead, decided to immediately install Pete Golding, their former defensive coordinator, as the next head coach of the Rebels.

LSU was bad enough to justify firing its head coach, Chip Kelly, halfway through the season. So it has been hard for many to understand what exactly it is, apart from money, that Kiffin could see in this program. In the eyes of the 50-year-old play caller, however, this was a “family decision” rather than a football one.

“It’s just something that I prayed on,” Kiffin told Smith. “Maybe it’s right, maybe it’s wrong, but I think, a lot of the time, you just go prove things right. And that’s what we’re going to do when we get there.”

By the time you’ve read this, Kiffin’s plane will have already touched down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He would have dove right into meetings and recruitment planning. And yes, it’s going to take a lot of work to make the nation forget about this one.

This entire debacle has already managed to take the spotlight off the failures of Kelly and this 2025 LSU roster. In that sense, Kiffin’s hiring has already been a success for the program.

Only time can tell whether or not he will actually return the Tigers to their former glory. But Kiffin has got them back to where they want to be, in the national spotlight. And that’ll likely keep them content for now.