Lane Kiffin has spent nearly 10 months in Baton Rouge, but on Thursday night he still sounded like a man who was figuring out the place in real time.
The LSU coach, fresh off his first Tiger Stadium experience from the home sideline, spent much of his latest coach’s show talking about the feel of it all - the crowd, the noise, the buildup, the energy that hit him before the game even started. That came after LSU’s 51-10 rout of No. 23 Clemson, a performance that followed a roughly two-hour lightning delay and played out in front of 102,321 at a Tiger Stadium that Kiffin described as overwhelming from the start.
“For myself, being there five times, but always on the other sideline, I had always pictured, ‘What would that have been like?’ Because you could feel the weight coming down on you on the opposing sideline,” Kiffin said Thursday night at the Court To Table restaurant near the LSU campus.
He’d seen Tiger Stadium plenty before Saturday, just never like this. Kiffin had been there five times as an opposing coach - twice as Alabama’s offensive coordinator in 2014 and ’16, then three times as Ole Miss’ head coach in 2020, ’22 and ’24.
He won both trips with Alabama, including a 20-13 overtime win in 2014 and a 10-0 victory in 2016 that was scoreless after three quarters. He lost all three with Ole Miss, including the 53-48 shootout in 2020, a 45-20 loss as the No. 7 team in the country against an unranked LSU team in 2022, and a 29-26 overtime defeat in 2025 when the Rebels were ranked No. 9 and LSU was No.
This time, the setting flipped, and Kiffin said the atmosphere showed itself before kickoff.
“It really does,” he said. “But I thought it would during the game.
It did it in warm-ups. In warm-ups!
I felt like there’s no way we’re going to lose, because the crowd was just so energetic and so excited for us to play. And it just really fit the players’ excitement.
I was happy that the day went the way it did, because it had been a long eight, nine months that we’d been here of going through a lot to put on a performance for three hours that everybody’d be happy with.”
Former LSU coach Ed Orgeron, now on Kiffin’s staff, had warned him what the home side could do.
His message was simple: “Just wait, man, it lifts you up.”
Kiffin said the entire scene delivered on that promise.
“It was just a really neat night,” Kiffin said of the win Saturday. “You guys have been on the home side a lot in this stadium.
I haven’t. So to feel that in the warm-ups, ‘Callin’ Baton Rouge (song),’ the whole thing, I was ready for it.”
He also said he tried to keep his team from getting carried away by the moment, even if that plan didn’t exactly stick.
“I tried to get them ready for it, ‘Hey, we don’t expend a lot of energy guys. It’s going to be a long game.
Let’s make sure we conserve energy in warm-ups. Let the crowd affect the other team,'” Kiffin said.
“And then all of a sudden, like, I found myself all jacked up. And then I look at the players, and they’re over there yelling with the student section.
So, it was really cool. The whole thing was awesome - the walk, it was like Mardi Gras.
So many people and so much excitement for the game to finally be here. I just can’t imagine a better feeling from a group of fans and a town for what it was like for me and for all the new players.”
Kiffin did not address the SEC developments that came out of Birmingham, Alabama, on Thursday, where the league’s presidents and chancellors met and there was no announcement of a reprimand, fine or any other punishment for Kiffin or LSU tied to his recruiting and gaining commitments from former NFL players after they were cut.
The situation had already shifted when Kiffin removed the two players he recruited - tight end Dae’Quan Wright of the Cleveland Browns and defensive tackle Zxavian Harris of the New Orleans Saints - from his roster by putting two returning LSU players who are out for the year with injuries on the team to get to the 105-player limit.
The SEC and commissioner Greg Sankey had pushed Kiffin for weeks not to add those players, even after a judge in Baton Rouge ruled they could play for LSU. Now, the two players may be suing the SEC for lost wages from NIL deals they had or were about to have with LSU.
Meanwhile, the league’s federal lawsuit against LSU over claims that LSU orchestrated the lawsuits that cleared Wright and Harris was delayed Wednesday in Birmingham, with no reason given. That came a day after Kiffin locked Wright and Harris off the roster, and it also came before a scheduled vote on whether to kick LSU out of the SEC over the controversy was canceled Thursday.
For now, LSU has gotten the better of the sequence: the lawsuit is delayed, the expulsion vote is gone, and the league has not handed down punishment. And Kiffin’s attention, at least publicly, stayed where it had been all week - on the crowd, the stadium, and the first time he finally got to feel Tiger Stadium from the side he’d always been watching.
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