LSU's Lane Kiffin evolving, embracing role as college football's villain: 'You’ll be a hero if you win'

TAMPA, Fla. — Back in May, Lane Kiffin glanced down at his phone to see a good friend and SEC rival coach calling.

>Texas coach Steve Sarkisian had a message for his buddy Lane. While visiting the University of Texas campus, Knox Kiffin, Lane’s son, had shared something with Sark about his father. My dad, Knox started, doesn’t always hear or listen to me because he’s on social media too much.

>This struck Sarkisian as something he should share with a fellow father. And, so, he did.

>Struck by the conversation, Lane approached Knox about eliminating social media from his life.

>“No way you’ll do that,” Knox told him.

>More than two months later, Lane Kiffin remains off social media applications, most notably Twitter, where for years he routinely fired up fan bases with incendiary posts, sarcastic messages and not-so-subtle jabs. He’s tweeted once since May 11, sending a poster of Michael Jordan with a message that reads, “They have no idea who you are becoming. Time to go ghost.”

>Kiffin told this tale about Sarkisian’s call privately in a walk-and-talk with a reporter Thursday as he lapped around the downtown Tampa Marriott. The SEC saved the best (or at least the most polarizing) for last, ending its four-day media event with a banger. Gracing the stages here were the new LSU coach and Texas, too, who brought here quarterback Arch Manning for a second straight year.

>Did the league do this as a way to prevent the some-odd 900 reporters attending to stick around through the last day? If so, it worked. Gaggles followed Lane’s every move and hung on his every word.

>After all, he created quite the stir this offseason: leaving one SEC school for another before his former team’s playoff run had even started and then dogging his ex-employer in several national publications (he did ultimately apologize). His Ole Miss exit caught enough attention that congressional lawmakers even created a provision in the latest college sports bill to prohibit coaches from leaving their team before that team’s season ends — a concept that U.S. senators openly refer to as “the Lane Kiffin Rule.”

>For those reasons — and many more — he’s the villain of college football.

>He appears to know this, perhaps even embraces it.

>Kiffin compares his career roller coaster to that of wrestling star Hulk Hogan. They were each the villain, then the hero, then the villain again, he says, of their respective industries. Kiffin resurrected Ole Miss football. He quit drinking. He re-established close relationships with his children and ex-wife.

>“In a way, you were more of a hero [at Ole Miss],” he said Thursday. “It’s like people started cheering for you.”

>And, then, he left Oxford for Baton Rouge in a controversial blaze, attempting to poach players (and coaches) before the Rebels’ playoff run and after the school rejected his request to coach through the postseason.

>Hero no more.

>“Now,” he said, “you’re back to the villain.”

>Maybe that’s not so bad. Maybe he’s embraced the role like his childhood idol, Hogan.

>“In the end, you watch his story and he became a hero. But during it, he’s the villain,” Kiffin says. “Everybody hates you, but Hulk looked at it differently because he was purely entertainment. He says in his [TV] special that whether they were for or against me, they loved coming into the arena.”

>Hogan died last July, a year after Kiffin lost his dad Monte. The two deaths — his mother passed last year, too — left a mark on a man forever known for his immature antics on the way out the door from one job to another.

>“You start to realize you’re going to die. We’re all going to die,” Kiffin said. “Two people I grew up with that are now dead, that makes you realize everybody is going to die: my dad and Hulk Hogan.”

>Whether you believe everything he says or not, Kiffin brought us into his mind during Thursday’s media day circus: Hero. Villain. Death. Twitter.

>He’s one of one. Kiffin is the first man to coach three different SEC football teams (Tennessee, Ole Miss, LSU). Ever.

>Of the three, the expectations in Baton Rouge may be the highest of them all. Three of the last four coaches at LSU won national championships by their fourth season, the school sits in one of the hottest recruiting regions of the country and the university is investing financially — in both the roster and staff — at nation-leading levels.

>The expectations have left Kiffin “uncomfortable,” he acknowledges. But he understands that’s the price for his pay (a $13 million annual salary).

>Devoid of social media, Kiffin says he’s now focused more on the job. His phone is now used for “texts and calls only.” He completely deleted all social media applications from his phone and has become a sort-of anti-social media spokesperson. “Who’d a thought it?” he said laughing.

>Kiffin describes his former social media behavior as one would describe an addiction. He’s now relieved of it and it’s “really refreshing,” he said. He’s no longer as defensive in news conferences because he’s not seeing negativity on his feed all day, he says, and he’s no longer comparing his life to others.

>“Comparisons are the thief of joy,” he says. “You don’t compare. You’re scrolling all day long. You see people doing things. You start to compare your job, city, vacation, job, car, clothes.”

>

>Kiffin has added social media to all the other things he’s “subtracted out of my life,” he says, like toxic relationships and alcohol.

>He mostly gets his news now from longtime LSU associate athletic director Michael Bonnette, who heads football communications and has turned back the clock, so to speak, by occasionally leaving on Kiffin’s desk printed screenshots of the most important news from social media.

>“The old way,” Bonnette says with a chuckle on Thursday.

>As it turns out, Bonnette printed Ole Miss coach Pete Golding’s comments about Kiffin from his Wednesday spin through media days. In his comments, Golding revealed how he recruited Ole Miss players to stay in Oxford and reject Kiffin’s overtures: He told them to Google “Lane Kiffin” to see the vitriol created from his departure to Baton Rouge.

>“That’ll be you,” Kiffin said, reciting what Golden told players.

>Kiffin chuckles a bit.

>He is, after all, the villain — at least for now.

>“You’ll be a hero if you win,” Kiffin says. “I think of Coach [Nick] Saban. He became the hero again because he won, but he was a villain.”