Lane Kiffin is back in the conversation around Jordan-Hare Stadium, and this time it’s as LSU’s head coach heading into a trip to Auburn that arrives with more than a little October weirdness attached.
Kiffin said Monday that he has heard all about the stadium’s haunted reputation, but he brushed it off with a line that fit the mood.
“I don’t think it’s haunted, but there is some magical stuff that has happened in there,” Kiffin said at his weekly press conference on Monday.
The timing only adds to the scene. No.
18 LSU (5-2, 2-2 Southeastern Conference) meets Auburn (4-2, 2-2 SEC) on Saturday at 11 a.m., one week before Halloween, and Auburn is coming off one of the biggest wins of the season anywhere in college football: a 27-24 upset of No. 1 Georgia in Athens last Saturday.
Jordan-Hare can still rattle people. The stadium holds 87,451 and has the kind of tight bowl that can turn noise into a weapon. But Auburn has not finished with a winning home record since the 2022 season, and this year it is 2-1 there after a 44-39 loss to Florida and wins over Southern Mississippi, 43-8, and Vanderbilt, 21-15.
Still, the lore around the place lives on, and Kiffin has been around enough SEC football to know why. Auburn’s 2013 home slate became legend: a 43-38 win over Georgia on a fortunate fourth-and-18, tipped touchdown pass with 25 seconds left, and then a 34-28 victory over Alabama on Chris Davis’ 100-yard plus return of a missed field goal as time expired.
Auburn reached the national championship game that season before falling 34-31 to Florida State. Its only other loss in the 13-2 season in 2012 came 35-21 at LSU.
The Tigers have had some recent success against LSU at Jordan-Hare, but the numbers still lean toward the visitors in the broader picture. LSU has won 10 of 22 games there, and Kiffin has already coached in the stadium three times, going 1-1 there as Ole Miss’ head coach in 2021 and ’23 and 1-0 as Alabama’s offensive coordinator in 2015.
Even so, Auburn’s pull was real enough that Kiffin remembered a conversation from when the school was trying to hire him after the 2022 football season.
“When Auburn was trying to hire me, Bruce Pearl tried to tell me that it was haunted, by the way,” Kiffin said.
At the time, Pearl was Auburn’s basketball coach and John Cohen was the athletic director leading the search. Kiffin turned the job down, Auburn hired Hugh Freeze, and Freeze lasted three seasons. Alex Golesh, the former South Florida head coach, is now in his first season at Auburn.
Kiffin said Pearl pitched the stadium in a way that was hard to forget.
According to Kiffin, Pearl told him, “Hey, you’ll get a win every year that you really don’t deserve, because magical things happen here. It’s haunted.”
Kiffin’s own focus, though, is on a different kind of football reality: relief syndrome. That’s the idea LSU is leaning on after Auburn’s emotional high from beating Georgia on the road.
“That’s a real thing,” Kiffin said. “Relief syndrome is real.”
He added that Nick Saban, his mentor when Kiffin served as Alabama’s offensive coordinator from 2014-16, has long believed in it.
“That’s a real thing that’s a real challenge,” Kiffin said. “I was rooting for them (Auburn) to win.”
LSU is listed as a 6.5-point favorite, even though the Tigers have dropped their last eight road SEC games.
Kiffin also said he did not have an update Monday on the status of two players injured in the win over Mississippi State on Saturday: wide receiver Jackson Harris, who has an ankle injury, and edge rusher Princewill Umanmielen, who has a concussion. He also did not update the situations for starting tight end Trey’Dez Green, who has a knee injury, and starting linebacker Whit Weeks, who has a leg injury.
“If we have something, it will be Wednesday,” Kiffin said.
The SEC will release availability reports from each school playing an SEC game on Wednesday night.
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