The AP Top 25 preseason poll arrived Monday afternoon, and once again the SEC made its presence felt. Nine of the league’s 16 teams showed up in the rankings, the conference grabbed half of the top 10, and two SEC programs landed just outside that elite group.
For Damien Harris, the team lurking most dangerously outside the preseason top 10 is LSU at No. 11.
The former Alabama running back pointed to the Tigers as the scariest team sitting just beyond that cutoff, tying his view to LSU’s high-profile move for Lane Kiffin during the 2025 regular season.
"It's the LSU Tigers, because if it's not, what have we been talking about all offseason?" Harris said.
"If not, what are they paying Lane Kiffin all this money for. If not, why did Lane Kiffin leave Ole Miss, where he said he didn't feel like he had the ultimate resources to win a national championship, to recruit, to do everything that he needed to do to be successful?
"If not, we have just wasted not just an offseason (but) more than half of last season on what Lane Kiffin going to LSU means for this program."
That kind of noise has followed LSU into 2026, and it’s not hard to see why. Kiffin was brought in with the expectation that he’d steer the Tigers toward a College Football Playoff berth, much like he did at Ole Miss. The roster has the look of a team built for that kind of jump, too, with transfers who were more than depth pieces at their previous stops and now profile as future NFL talent.
Some around the sport have even gone as far as calling LSU national championship-caliber, a big label for any coach in his first year at a new school. The schedule won’t make life any easier, either. LSU faces one of the toughest slates in the country, and that’s part of the SEC reality after the league moved to a nine-game conference schedule.
Harris’ view of Kiffin is rooted in his own Alabama background. After Kiffin was fired by USC in 2013, Nick Saban brought him in to replace the Michigan-bound Doug Nussmeier as Alabama’s offensive coordinator.
Harris arrived in Tuscaloosa as a top-three running back prospect in the 2015 recruiting cycle. Derrick Henry handled the bulk of the carries that season, but Harris still chipped in 46 rushes for 157 yards and a touchdown during Alabama’s national championship run.
His biggest year on the ground came in 2016, Kiffin’s final season as offensive coordinator, when Harris rushed for 1,040 yards and two touchdowns. Kiffin left for Florida Atlantic before Alabama’s College Football Playoff run that season.
Harris stayed two more seasons with the Crimson Tide before entering the 2019 NFL draft, where the New England Patriots picked him. He finished his Alabama career with 3,073 rushing yards, 23 rushing touchdowns, 52 catches, 407 receiving yards and two receiving touchdowns.
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Former Alabama Player Just Won A Massive Case Tied To 2023 Shooting
A former Alabama basketball player has now won a major legal battle that reached far beyond the court. An Alabama jury ordered The New York Times to pay $9.25 million in damages to Kai Spears after finding the paper defamed him by wrongly reporting that he was at the scene of a fatal 2023 shooting, a claim Spears challenged in a lawsuit filed in 2023.
The nine-day trial ended with the jury siding with Spears, putting a sharp spotlight on how a mistaken report can follow an athlete long after his playing days. The Times had acknowledged the error in its original story and said it is reviewing its legal options after the verdict, leaving the case with another chapter still possible. [Read more 🡒]