Lane Kiffin isn’t treating artificial intelligence like some gimmick on the fringe of football. He’s talking about it the same way he talks about recruiting, NIL and the transfer portal: as another tool coaches ignore at their own risk.
During a question-and-answer session Wednesday with the Baton Rouge Rotary Club at Tiger Stadium, the LSU coach said his staff has already started discussing how AI could fit into player evaluation.
“We’re having conversations about that,” Kiffin said. “That probably sounds really strange to people.
We actually had a meeting about that yesterday, because we have started to talk about using that when it comes to evaluating players, which blows my mind that it’s gotten that close to where we can do that put a film into it. And it it can give an evaluation of the player.”
Kiffin said the human side of scouting would still matter, but he sees value in adding another layer.
“We’d still have human elements in that evaluation, but it is a really amazing resource,” he said. “I didn’t even know all it can do.”
He even got a laugh out of a story about LSU pass game coordinator and receivers coach George McDonald, who works out with him in the mornings. Kiffin said he had noticed McDonald dressing better lately and asked about the new wardrobe.
“Yeah, I take a picture and send it to AI and ask it how good I look,” Kiffin said McDonald told him.
“So, it can do that,” Kiffin said.
That kind of openness fits the way Kiffin has handled change before. He pointed to his early embrace of Name, Image & Likeness and the transfer portal, both of which arrived in the summer of 2021. In his view, resisting new tools only leaves a program behind.
“Do you embrace it? Or do you go, ‘No, we’re not doing that, because we’re coaches, and they didn’t used to do that?
The old coaches never did that,'” Kiffin said. “Well, that passes you by.
If you did that, you’d still be sitting in I-formation huddling. Which we did here for a while.”
The line drew a laugh, and it also fit the larger point he was making. LSU’s offense moved away from that old-school look in 2019, when offensive coordinator Steve Ensminger and pass game coordinator Joe Brady leaned into true multi-receiver sets with quarterback Joe Burrow and head coach Ed Orgeron.
Kiffin said he heard the same kind of skepticism when NIL and the portal first took hold.
“What I’ve done is I’ve not sat around and complained about it,” he said. “And I’ve just embraced it.
I said, ‘This is what it (NIL) is. How do we best maximize the situation?’
And I believe that really worked well, because when NIL started, a lot of people - administrators, people way up at universities - their first thing was, ‘It’s going to go away. We don’t need to do that.
Don’t worry. It’s not going to stick.'”
He added that ignoring the shift would have been a mistake.
“I said at the time, ‘If you believe it’s going to go away and you operate that way, you’re going to have new coaches, because you’re going to have fired us, because we will have fallen behind so far that we’ll lose,'” Kiffin said. “It actually happened over time in Major League Baseball.”
Kiffin also tied that thinking to the analytics wave in baseball. He said he was at USC in 2002 when the Oakland Athletics won the American League West at 103-59 with a low-budget, metrics-driven approach under general manager Billy Beane.
“That usually doesn’t work,” Kiffin said. “Now, the one time it works out, they make a movie about it.”
That movie was “Moneyball,” released in 2011 and set in 2002, with Brad Pitt playing Beane.
“But most of the time, it doesn’t work,” Kiffin said.
The coach’s own roster-building has followed a similarly aggressive path. He signed the No. 1 portal class in 2026 with 41 players, and LSU’s roster is estimated to cost more than $40 million. Kiffin said winning now requires serious NIL investment, though he stressed that money alone does not tell the whole story.
“Part of it is NIL opportunities,” he said. “It’s not just, do they have the donor base to raise the money? It’s, do they have the NIL opportunities because of the brand of the school?”
He pointed to LSU’s brand as a major selling point, noting that the school has 12 football players signed to Nike NIL deals, with the next best at eight.
“So, look at the brand opportunities when you come to LSU,” Kiffin said. “It’s not just how much money do you have at LSU from donors. A player can say, ‘I can make my brand better when I go there.'”
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