Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter said Lane Kiffin knew for quite some time that he wouldn’t be able to coach Ole Miss in the College Football Playoff if he left for LSU.
After leaving for LSU on Sunday, Kiffin said in a statement he thought he would be able to coach the Rebels in the CFP as late as that morning. That’s not true, Carter said in an interview with SuperTalk Mississippi on Wednesday.
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“There’s been a lot of things he’s said publicly that I’m not sure are totally accurate,” Carter said. “I think that both coach and his representation knew several weeks ago that coaching in the playoffs was not going to be an option if he was not the Ole Miss head coach.”
Carter was then directly asked about Kiffin’s claim.
“No, that’s not accurate. That’s not accurate. The only thing that was a little bit of a wrinkle in it was the fact that if Auburn had beaten Alabama, we were going to play in the SEC championship,” Carter said. “That threw a little wrinkle in it, not to say that he would have coached in that game, but with the shorter time period, that was maybe the only little nuance to it, but absolutely it was very clear that coaching in the postseason was not going to be an option for Coach Kiffin a few weeks ago.”
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Carter is not the first person affiliated with Ole Miss to refute what Kiffin has said in the wake of taking the LSU job. On Tuesday, multiple players took to social media to dispute Kiffin’s claim that the entire team wanted him to stay for the College Football Playoff.
Additionally, the Mississippi Department of Public Safety said to Mississippi Today that it has no evidence of a car trying to run Kiffin off the road when he was heading to the airport to leave for LSU. Kiffin claimed at his LSU press conference that someone tried to run him off the road.
The department said that Kiffin had an escort from the highway patrol to the airport.
Kiffin had publicly wrestled with the decision to stay at Ole Miss or leave for LSU (or maybe even Florida) for weeks. The decision had become so dramatic and public that Carter even released a statement before Week 13 saying that an announcement on Kiffin’s decision would come on Saturday, Nov. 29.
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By now, you know that Saturday came and went without an announcement, as Kiffin’s decision stretched into Sunday when he finally boarded a plane to Baton Rouge.
Even before Kiffin’s departure was officially announced, it became public that Ole Miss had promoted defensive coordinator Pete Golding to replace him. Golding will coach the team in the College Football Playoff. So will offensive coordinator Charlie Weis Jr., who was one of the handful of staff members who followed Kiffin to LSU. In a statement on Tuesday, Kiffin said that he wanted Weis, the team’s offensive play-caller, to coach in the playoff so that Ole Miss would not get dinged by the playoff committee.
