Lane Kiffin didn’t just show up at SEC Media Days and talk. He took over the room.
Before anyone could even get to a question in Tampa on Thursday, the LSU head coach had already delivered a 2,807-word opening statement - the longest in the history of the event, according to reporter Brett McMurphy, who tracks the counts. Kiffin’s marathon monologue topped the 2,787 words South Carolina coach Shane Beamer used two days earlier, and it left only four questions for the rest of the session.
Not that Kiffin seemed in any hurry. He opened with a joke - “Four score and seven years ago...”
Just kidding. - and then kept rolling. The whole thing stretched more than 16 minutes, a far cry from his usual pace.
CBS Sports reporter David Cobb noted that Kiffin’s five opening statements at Ole Miss averaged five minutes and 32 seconds, while his first one there lasted just two minutes and seven seconds.
The contrast with the other end of the spectrum could not have been sharper. The late Mike Leach once opened his 2022 SEC Media Days session with five words, per the same tracker: “I appreciate that.
Any questions?” Then he handed the floor back to the media and let it work.
Kiffin, by comparison, covered a lot of ground before the questions ever started. He thanked commissioner Greg Sankey and said he had met him 17 years earlier at Tennessee.
He spoke about his late father, Monte Kiffin, who coached the Tampa Bay defense. He mentioned his son Knox, a high school quarterback.
He talked about Baton Rouge, too.
“The seven months at LSU have been awesome,” he said. “Louisiana has real hard-working people who are really passionate and who love football.
That’s been great. There are so many things to do in Baton Rouge, and New Orleans is right down the road.”
He also explained why he stepped away from social media, saying Knox pushed him into it.
“Wasn't a long-term plan,” Kiffin said. “It was really interesting to see as I went through it because Knox pushing me to do that, challenging me, allowed me to help other players, friends, coaches to say, 'man, you should try this sometime' because once you remove something from your life, you start to realize how many other people are addicted to it or need it.”
Kiffin also addressed the nine-game SEC schedule and the way the playoff committee evaluates strength of schedule.
“Teams will eventually get out of the bigger nonconference games because the selection process is not fixed,” he said. “Until that is fixed to really truly reward strength of schedule, I was against it because I think what you're going to have is more conference losses.”
One topic never came up during the televised portion: his Week 3 return to Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. Kiffin left Ole Miss for LSU before the Rebels played in the College Football Playoff, and that was the storyline many people wanted to hear about. It stayed off the table until one of the four questions finally got around to it.
That question came after Kiffin’s comments to Vanity Fair, where he said the lack of diversity around Oxford hurt recruiting compared to LSU.
“You do things, and you make really good decisions, and you make poor decisions,” Kiffin said.
“That was a poor usage of a term that I believe, just like many coaches that have been there before, was factual. But over the course of a long interview, (that) was bad timing and bad usage of the word.
It is what it is. I apologized when I said it, and moving on.”
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