Lane Kiffin isn’t rushing to redraw the map for LSU’s road games, even after his team opened SEC play away from home with two losses by a combined nine points.
The No. 18 Tigers head to Auburn on Saturday for an 11 a.m. kickoff on ABC, and they’ll do it against a Tigers team that just knocked off No.
1 Georgia 27-24. LSU is 5-2 overall and 2-2 in the SEC, while Auburn comes in at 4-2 and 2-2.
Kiffin’s own road record against ranked SEC opponents has drawn attention for years, but the numbers tell a more complicated story. He is 1-10 as an SEC coach on the road against ranked conference teams since 2009, yet that doesn’t match the full picture of his time in the league. He went 13-11 in SEC road games at Ole Miss from 2020-25 and was 1-3 on the road in the SEC during his 2009 season at Tennessee.
This season, his road losses have been close enough to sting. LSU fell 32-24 at No.
7 Ole Miss on Sept. 19, then dropped a 35-34 overtime decision at No. 25 Kentucky on Oct.
- Those two opponents are a combined 11-2 overall and 7-2 in SEC play.
Kiffin doesn’t sound interested in treating those defeats as evidence that LSU needs a wholesale philosophical shift.
“Yeah, probably a little bit overrated,” Kiffin said of his team needing to “learn to win” on the road. “Kick goes in, and somebody says, ‘You learned to win, man.’
And then it hits the upright, and they say, ‘You guys don’t know how to win on the road.’ I think it really goes back to execution in critical situations.”
The Ole Miss game in particular left him pointing to the final moments, when LSU had a third-and-goal from the Ole Miss 6-yard line and came up empty on two plays. The Kentucky loss carried its own controversy.
Kentucky lined up for a walk-off two-point conversion after overtime tied the game at 34-34, but Kiffin said a false start happened just before the snap. That would have pushed the Wildcats back five yards and, he said, likely led to an extra point and a 34-34 tie with the game continuing.
Instead, Kentucky was granted a timeout it said it had called before the play, got another shot, converted the two-point try and won 35-34.
“We’ve had as bad breaks as anybody,” Kiffin said. “False start on a two-point play doesn’t even happen, and doesn’t count. And we get an apology for it,” Kiffin said of the no-call on the false start (presumably from the SEC office).
“Thanks,” he said sarcastically.
Even with those tight margins, Kiffin said he isn’t eager to make changes just for the sake of making them. His view is that road losses usually come down to self-inflicted mistakes more than some special road-game formula.
“A lot of times on the road, as you break down your losses, and close losses, they’re usually not as much how many plays they make,” he said. “It’s more the mistakes you make - more penalties, more false starts and more turnovers than when you play at home.”
When asked whether LSU needs to adjust operationally before its next road test, Kiffin pointed to the number of chances still ahead.
“The good thing is they’ll have practice at it, because we have five SEC road games,” he said.
After Auburn, LSU still has road trips to Tennessee on Nov. 21 and Arkansas on Nov. 28.
Kiffin said he’s still reviewing everything, but he’s not prepared to overreact to two narrow defeats that could have easily broken the other way.
“I don’t know, we’re always looking at everything,” he said. “I don’t want to over-analyze where you change just to change, because we’re not getting that question if we go for it on fourth-and-one and make one yard (at Kentucky in regulation while leading 27-24).
Or stop them in the two-minute (after LSU punted). So, there are so many things in that game that we’ve talked about.
Four series where we were ahead. If we do one of the four, then no one is saying, ‘Oh, you need to change what you do on the road.’
So, I don’t think there’s too much data there yet to change.”
Not yet anyway.
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