Lane Kiffin used his first SEC Media Days appearance as LSU’s coach to do something far more effective than answer questions: he ate up the clock.
At the Tampa Marriott Water Street main ballroom on Thursday morning, Kiffin spent more than 15 minutes talking before finally opening the floor, leaving himself only four questions in the primary press conference. The setup was deliberate enough to feel like a filibuster, the kind of marathon speech that would have made former Louisiana governor and LSU devotee Huey Long proud.
Kiffin’s opening stretch wandered through a long salute to SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, then moved to his son Knox, the starting quarterback at University High. From there he talked about his late father, Monte Kiffin, the former NFL assistant coach and Tampa Bay Buccaneers defensive coordinator, and his own history of spending plenty of time in Tampa.
Only after all that did he settle into LSU.
“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 praised the alignment he’s found with LSU president Wade Rousse and athletic director Verge Ausberry, and pointed to the school’s NIL footprint. Kiffin said LSU has 12 athletes with Nike deals, four more than the next school. He noted that one of them is Jordan Seaton, the No. 1 offensive tackle in the portal and No. 3 overall portal player, whom Kiffin signed last January from Colorado.
“There’s never been a college offensive lineman ever have a deal with Nike,” Kiffin said.
He added, “I can’t wait to get to practices,” and later, “I really just can’t wait to get on the field.”
Practice for the 2026 season begins next month, and LSU opens against Clemson on Sept. 5 at Tiger Stadium at 6:30 p.m. on ABC.
When the questions finally came, the first centered on what LSU spent on its 2026 roster through Name, Image & Likeness, collectives and revenue share. Kiffin didn’t give a direct number, but he circled the topic and stayed there for several minutes.
The second question revisited the Vanity Fair article from last May 11, in which Kiffin said some out-of-state prospects he recruited at Ole Miss from 2020-25 were turned off by Mississippi’s racial past, as they had been told. Chris Smith wrote that top recruits would tell Kiffin, “Hey, coach, we really like you. But my grandparents aren’t letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi.”
The article also quoted Kiffin saying, “That doesn’t come up when you say ‘Baton Rouge, Louisiana.’ Parents were sitting here this weekend saying the campus diversity feels so great.
‘It feels like there’s no segregation. And we want that for our kid because that’s the real world.’”
After the piece ran, Kiffin told On3.com, “I really apologize if anybody at Ole Miss or in Mississippi was offended by that,” and on Thursday he acknowledged the misstep again.
“You do things and you make really good decisions, and you make poor decisions,” Kiffin said. “And that was a poor usage of a term that I believe, just like many coaches, that was factual.
But over the course of a long interview was bad timing and bad usage of the word. So, it is what it is.
I apologized when I said it. And moving on.”
The third question touched on the Auburn-LSU rivalry, with the teams meeting this season for the first time since 2023 after years of annual games. It was an awkwardly timed prompt for a coach whose move from Ole Miss to LSU has kept him at the center of the sport’s conversation, and it didn’t produce much beyond a brief answer.
The last question asked whether Kiffin felt he had been unfairly judged for leaving Ole Miss for LSU after the regular season, with the Rebels headed to the College Football Playoff.
“Well, the good thing is I don’t know if I do, because I don’t read anything,” Kiffin said.
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