Saturday’s LSU-Ole Miss matchup comes with the usual top-10 stakes, but the real theater in Oxford is the reunion on the sidelines. No.
7 LSU and No. 8 Ole Miss meet at Vaught Hemingway Stadium, and the game has put Lane Kiffin and Pete Golding back in the same spotlight after a messy split that still has people talking.
Golding, now the Ole Miss head coach after working under Kiffin, has spent the offseason trying to keep the tone calm. He said, “Lane and I are good,” and added that he has “no ill will toward coach Kiffin,” even if the outside world keeps circling the same old questions about what happened between them.
Kiffin, though, has never been shy about leaning into the awkwardness. At SEC media days, he turned Golding moving into his old house into a joke about his Ring doorbell camera.
“He can’t be wherever it was at this recruit’s house, he’s on my couch. I just saw him walk in.”
Kiffin said. “I told him afterwards, ‘You might want to change the Ring camera.’”
That kind of banter has kept the story alive, even as both men have tried to frame things as mostly professional. Kiffin also made clear last season that he didn’t expect total agreement from Golding, or vice versa.
“I don’t expect Pete Golding to agree with everything I do, nor would I agree with everything he said in press conferences during that transition,” Kiffin said at the end of last season. “It’s not my job to do what he wants.
It’s not his job to do what I want. ”
Kiffin has also said he regrets how messy the move from Ole Miss to LSU became. From the outside, though, the relationship now looks more civil than combustible, even if the history underneath it is impossible to ignore.
Golding has acknowledged that, too. At SEC Media Days, he used a marriage analogy to explain why the old storyline keeps resurfacing.
“If you do get married, right, and you have an ex that your wife knows about, she doesn’t ever age, she’s never dead - she’s always going to be brought up,” Golding said. “That’s kind of where it is right now.”
The same theme came up again during Monday’s game-week press conferences. Golding said his connection with Kiffin was strong on a personal level, but not the same professionally.
“From a friendship standpoint, I developed a really good relationship with him over three and a half years. From a football professional standpoint, we don’t bounce ideas off of each other like we used to,” Golding said. “Definitely still friends.”
Kiffin wasn’t directly asked about Golding in that setting, but he did point to the hostility of the environment around his return to Oxford as the bigger issue.
With LSU coming in after a pair of big season-opening wins, the matchup is also a chance to show how smoothly the Kiffin era has started in Baton Rouge. Still, the subplot hanging over the game is the same one that has followed these coaches for months: former colleagues, now on opposite sides, trying to keep things polite while the football world waits to see how sharp the edge really is.
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