No wonder Lane Kiffin wanted Trinidad Chambliss at LSU.
After watching the sixth-year Ole Miss quarterback carve up the Tigers in a 32-24 loss last Saturday, Kiffin was left talking about the same problem everyone else in the SEC now has to solve: Chambliss keeps making plays, and he keeps making them look hard to stop.
That was the story in Oxford, where LSU defensive coordinator Blake Baker won’t have to see Chambliss again unless the Tigers run into Ole Miss in the Southeastern Conference Championship Game on Dec. 5 in Atlanta or in the College Football Playoff. For now, the rest of the league gets the headache. And there are plenty of teams on deck.
No. 21 Florida visits today at 2:30 p.m. on ABC.
No. 1 Texas comes to Austin on Oct. 24, with Arch Manning waiting to be watched and studied.
Then No. 2 Georgia goes to Oxford on Nov. 7, followed by No.
19 Missouri on Oct. 17 and No. 24 Mississippi State on Nov.
Chambliss, listed at 6-foot-10 and 185 pounds, punished LSU through the air and on the ground. He went 33 of 48 for 363 yards and two touchdowns, and he added nine carries for 36 yards, including a naked 14-yard bootleg touchdown that gave Ole Miss a 30-24 lead with 6:14 left. Former LSU running back JT Lindsey followed with a two-point conversion.
Kiffin, now at LSU, was blunt about what made Chambliss such a problem.
“Out biggest fear every minute was the game at the end, and Trinidad has the ball in his hand,” said LSU coach Lane Kiffin, who brought him to Oxford from Ferris State before the 2025 season, but after spring drills when Kiffin was the coach at Ole Miss.
That wasn’t the first time Chambliss had put LSU on its heels. On Sept. 22, 2025, he helped No.
13 Ole Miss rip through No. 4 LSU and Brian Kelly’s defense for 314 passing yards.
Chambliss completed 23 of 39 passes that night, ran 14 times for 71 yards, and didn’t even win the starting job until Week 3 last season.
He still finished third in the nation with 3,937 passing yards, along with 22 passing touchdowns. On the ground, he added 527 yards and eight scores. By the end of it, he and Kiffin had Ole Miss in the playoffs before Kiffin left for LSU.
Watching that same quarterback beat him in Oxford had to sting.
“He made a lot of plays,” Kiffin said. “That’s why he’s the hardest player to play in America.”
Kiffin kept circling back to Chambliss after the game, and on the Sunday after Ole Miss beat LSU, he sounded like a coach still trying to process what he had just seen.
“We did pretty good on first and second downs, and he would just make either critical on-time throws with people on him or out-of-rhythm throws running backwards,” he said.
One sequence in particular seemed to stick with him. In the third quarter, Chambliss was close to being sacked, then somehow flipped the ball out like Patrick Mahomes for a 19-yard gain. Kiffin threw up his hands.
“It was my first time on the other side of it,” Kiffin said. “And he’s even better now.
I said to our staff, ‘Guys, you’re going to play a 24-year-old that the first guy never tackles. That’s like putting Caleb Williams back and having to defend him now in college.”
Williams, the first pick of the 2024 NFL Draft out of USC, is 24 and in his third year as Chicago’s quarterback.
“And I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather go against Caleb - no disrespect to him,” Kiffin said.
There’s a twist to all of this: Kiffin also played a role in helping Chambliss secure that extra year. The NCAA had turned down his request tied to a missed season at Ferris State because of injury, and Kiffin recommended sports attorney Tom Mars to Chambliss’ camp last December after he was at LSU.
Kiffin clearly wanted Chambliss in Baton Rouge for year six, but he still ended up helping him back to Oxford indirectly. Ole Miss already had lawyers William Liston and Trey Byars working on the case, so Mars may not have been necessary.
Still, Yahoo’s Ross Dellenger reported that Mars received a Chambliss No. 6 jersey in the mail after a Mississippi judge ruled in February that Chambliss would get his sixth year.
“It’s really funny,” Mars told Dellenger. “Lane set this in motion.”
Or, maybe, set Chambliss in motion again.
You’re welcome, Ole Miss.
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