Sophia Michaels
The Lane Train is headed to Oxford. In a piece of news that had been speculated for the last few days, Ole Miss football announced that Lane Kiffin will become the program’s next head football coach. Kiffin will come to the Rebels by way of Florida Atlantic, with whom he won the Conference USA championship on Saturday afternoon.
Ole Miss’ Twitter account sent out a few hints throughout the day that Kiffin would be next in line. They tweeted out a GIF of white smoke rising up from a chimney, an allusion to what happens when a new pope is chosen. (SEC football: It’s weird!)
The next hint involved a GIF of a train, and shortly after that, a clip of Baby Yoda listening to “C’Mon ‘N Ride It (The Train)” by Quad City DJs was the next hint.
All signs pointed to Kiffin, and eventually, the news became official. Of course, Kiffin is something of a controversial name in the world of football — his tenure as the head coach of the Oakland Raiders came to an abrupt end when he was fired. He then took over as the head coach at Tennessee, which he left after one season to go to USC. That didn’t go all that well, either, and he was famously fired five games into fourth year.
Kiffin then went to Alabama to serve as Nick Saban’s offensive coordinator, where he was wildly successful. It got him the job at FAU, where he’s spent the last three years. He’s accrued a 61-34 record as a college head coach, and in two of his three years with the Owls, Kiffin won the C-USA. In fact, after winning the conference on Saturday, he was asked about whether that was his final game, to which he did not say no.
Ole Miss is a tough job, if only because breaking through in the SEC West is brutally hard. But the university believed Kiffin could accomplish this, and as such, the Rebels went out and got their man.
Written by: Uproxx
