LSU Tigers football coach Lane Kiffin emphasizes the advantage of attracting high school recruits that he didn't experience at Ole Miss. He suggests that the full impact of this change will be evident in the next two to three years.

LSU Tigers football coach Lane Kiffin keeps pointing out one thing heāll have now that he didnāt at Ole Miss originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
LSU Tigers football coach Lane Kiffin continues to stress that high school recruits are going to sign up to play for his Bayou Bengals in a way he didnāt foresee ever happening in Oxford, Mississippi, with the Ole Miss Rebels. It also seemed Kiffin was hedging the Tigers potentially not winning it all during the 2026 season by mentioning the process may fully bear results in āYear 2, 3.ā
Per Kiffin while speaking to On3ās Wilson Alexander, "It'll show in Year 2, 3. It's going to show that we have the same systems, we have all this stuff and we brought it here, and combined it with the branding of LSU and the ability to sign elite high school (players). That will show. It may not be next year, but this wasnāt a one-year decision."
LSU isnāt a rebuild, so that idea needs to go out the window. Given how Kiffin built his Ole Miss teams via the portal, itās particularly strange for him not to believe his massive investments in guys like Arizona State Sun Devils transfer quarterback Sam Leavitt and transfer left tackle Jordan Seaton.
Lane Kiffin believes LSU has a significant advantage in attracting elite high school recruits, which he did not experience at Ole Miss.
Kiffin expects to see the results of his recruiting efforts in Year 2 or 3, indicating a longer-term vision for the program.
Kiffin is investing in transfer quarterback Sam Leavitt from Arizona State and transfer left tackle Jordan Seaton from Colorado.
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Still, itās hard not to catch that Kiffin keeps trying to justify his decision to jump ship in the middle of the CFP last year by talking about the long-term process. Kiffin had the chance to win right there and now this past December and January, but chose not to.
Kiffinās statements to Alexander are quite the juxtaposition to what he said to Vanity Fairās Chris Smith in a piece published days prior. In that interview, Kiffin painted the University of Mississippi in a negative light.
In it, he shared two different anonymous accounts of high school recruitsā parents telling āHey, coach, we really like you. But my grandparents arenāt letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi,ā and āIt feels like thereās no segregation.ā
Kiffin really wants to hammer home the point that Ole Miss wasnāt the right place to him because they didnāt have the resources and couldnāt land the best high school recruits. Who is he trying to convince at this point?