Eating to win: NHL stars find an edge by focusing on nutrition
Philipp Grubauer didn’t feel bad, exactly. He didn’t feel good, either.
The goaltender was merely coasting along during his inaugural season with the Colorado Avalanche in 2018-19, preparing for games as he always had and ignoring — at first — his body’s increasing lethargy.
At the time Grubauer was like most of his NHL peers, wielding a meticulous and well-thought-out pregame routine that didn’t include questioning how — or, more importantly, why — he was eating certain things. Convenience trumped everything.
And then, Grubauer hit a wall.
“I didn’t really pay attention to food my first years in the league. It wasn’t a big thing,” Grubauer told ESPN last month. “But the more I thought about it, I was actually feeling pretty tired [during games]. Like probably around the first or second period, I was usually pretty tired, and I would pump myself full of energy bars and all that [processed] stuff in between periods.
“It probably wasn’t right. But time is really short to cook something at home. By the time you get home from morning skate and have your nap, you almost have to get right back. I needed a way to make food easy so I could focus more on the game.”
It was around then that Grubauer, who now plays for the Seattle Kraken, received a call from Amanda Gyuran. She’s a Denver-based performance chef and co-founder of Elevated Eats, a meal prep service for professional athletes. The two got to talking, and Grubauer thought he had found a perfect solution, someone to design and execute an eating plan with minimal effort required on his part.
He signed on to be Gyuran’s client. It was the first step in an eye-opening journey ahead.
“At first it was just about the food,” Grubauer said. “And then we got rolling and we did a couple of tests, like gut tests and DNA tests where it shows what your body can absorb or what nutrients it can’t absorb. Like, from eating steak, your body might not pull iron out of the steak; it might pull it better out of salmon for example or from a different vegetable. So, from the time Amanda started cooking for me, we got it dialed in a little bit more and more.”
Welcome to the world of designer athlete nutrition. It’s an increasingly popular trend in an industry where longevity is paramount, execution is key and finding the slightest edge can add extra zeros to a paycheck.
GYURAN WORKS WITH players across every major sport, each with their own motivations for seeking out an alternative health approach but with a common goal of maximizing their potential. That requires taking an individual outlook on each person and getting down to the nitty-gritty of what makes their body tick.
“Before anything else, I have all my athletes go through advanced functional lab work with medical and naturopathic doctors,” Gyuran said. “That’s really their blood markers, stool, urine, genetics. That really helps us to customize both the supplements and meal plans we give them based on exactly what’s going on inside. We also test what antioxidants their bodies respond best with, and everyone is so different.”
That might be true on the genetics side. But through uncovering the unique variabilities of each client, Gyuran also found that athletes within certain sports were more alike internally than you’d expect.
“What’s kind of cool is that, especially with hockey players, they have a lot of similar things in their lab work around hormone levels and vitamin deficiencies,” Gyuran said. “It’s the lab work that really makes what we do most effective, because really anyone can make healthy foods for an athlete. But adding in all of these really specific ingredients helps us to give every meal a purpose.”
It’s an approach tailor-made for an athlete’s framework, the same way his skates are sized to an individual foot. When Kylene Bogden, a board-certified sports dietitian and functional nutritionist, was working at Cleveland Clinic early in her career, she began seeing players drawn to that more holistic, progressive approach in addressing not just food issues but overall health concerns.
She recalls one athlete who had no idea he was living with a dairy allergy. His daily bowls of cereal were causing unexplained chronic congestion and fatigue that wouldn’t resolve and ultimately impacted his performance. Bogden discovered the issue via blood work and within a day, she realized, “he could breathe again.”
“You’d see some of these athletes, and they weren’t healthy,” Bogden said. “They were bloated after every meal or they had a face full of acne, eczema, psoriasis, hives. They’re taking [medicine] every day to get through the season because of how crazy their allergies are. This is not OK. We have to dive deeper than this basic surface-level, conventional nutrition approach because it’s one thing to have a low body fat. But if your total body health is not in line, you’ll never reach peak performance, and we need to start making this unique to players.”
Having access to that standard of care and information is a privilege professional athletes have over the average person. Ditto being able to afford services like Gyuran’s that hand-deliver an optimal diet. It’s not a position Grubauer takes being in for granted, especially when the benefits of implementing his assigned changes came about more rapidly than expected.
“I would say [I felt different] in, like, a week,” he said. “Your body has to adjust a little bit, but once you eat the right stuff, your body starts to adapt right away. We were eating better, eating cleaner, and I didn’t have that tiredness anymore. So it started off just with food focus, and then once I got more knowledge behind her food and what she makes and the science behind it, it moved on to a different perspective.”
CALE MAKAR DOESN’T leave anything to chance. Not on the ice, not on his plate.
Colorado’s top-pairing defenseman found Gyuran when he ran up against some new dietary restrictions. Makar aimed to tackle the challenge head-on, and he relied on Gyuran’s adjustments to find a path forward supporting both his body and his play.
Makar was so impressed with the offerings and overall food philosophy that he began shunning some team-provided meals in favor of fueling road trips with Gyuran’s cooking too.
So Gyuran would pack Makar coolers to take with him. Then, rather than risk eating unknown fare in an unfamiliar city, Makar finds access to a microwave and heats up those preferred, pre-prepared dishes.
The reigning Norris and Conn Smythe trophy winner has no regrets.
“I take the pregames on the road, and I love it,” he said. “It can be a little bit of a hassle sometimes, but at the end of the day, I know exactly what I’m putting in my body, and there’s a convenience to it, for sure. It goes to the mental aspect of the game, knowing you don’t have any questions in the back of your mind: Did I do something wrong during the day? Did I not have the same pregame meal?
“You try to maintain and control everything that you can, and for me the diet aspect of it is definitely important.”
Not every athlete will be so fastidious about their eating, but Gyuran has seen a genuine uptick in the number who are. Like Makar, many are driven by mitigating the risk of switching up habits or by run-of-the-mill superstition that what worked well before one game will be the right choice again.
“A lot of the guys use the excuse of, ‘Oh, I’m already bringing so much stuff on the road’ or they don’t care enough to do it,” Gyuran said. “But the ones who do, they want to eat the food custom-made for them. So I vacuum seal meals in a cooler with their pregame meals or snacks in there. They’re getting muffins or recovery electrolyte gummies, or sometimes I’ll pack them up pregame drinks that really help to boost nitric oxide and blood flow and support their energy with beet juice and pomegranate juice. And then I add in specific ingredients based on their labs, whether it was B12 or the mushrooms that can help with energy and endurance.”
Those performance boosters were, until recently, a foreign concept to Makar. He admits to being a “picky eater” for much of his youth and to exploring the many dining hall options available during his first season at the University of Massachusetts in 2017-18.
When Makar arrived in the NHL two years later, he saw that some players were more careful about what they put in their body, and he got an education in the dressing room on how doing the right things nutritionally could lead to better results in his game.
Pivoting to Gyuran’s style of eating made that message hit home.
“Basically, all of my guys eat a Paleo-ish [diet],” she said. “It’s all gluten-free, soy-free and mostly dairy-free, with the exception of eating grass-fed butter and ghee sometimes. It’s refined-sugar-free and mostly grain-free. They’ll have white rice occasionally. But the focus is on high-quality organic grass-fed proteins. Starchy veggies and fruits are the carbohydrate sources. I find that a lot of athletes feel better on that.”
A typical meal for Makar consists of “sweet potato, maybe a little bit of rice, chicken, probably some salmon in there as well, and then usually there’s just some vegetables like a salad or some broccoli just to help digestion,” he said.
It’s a far cry from the stereotypical sustenance players are thought to be downing, such as sauce-laden pasta dishes or regular postgame pizzas. Those are still on the menu for some — and can certainly be seen now and then in the hallways outside an NHL dressing room — but Makar is among those who stick to what’s in his lunchbox.
“If you feel good when you’re eating a certain way, then it’s a no-brainer,” he said. “And in my mind, it’s just, ‘Why give up on that?’ Everybody’s always trying to get better, and that’s the atmosphere that you want. So regardless of if it’s during the game or food-wise, people are always looking for that edge.”
JAMES VAN RIEMSDYK recalls receiving some critical advice early in his career.
“I knew this performance coach years ago,” the Philadelphia Flyers winger said. “And I asked him, ‘What’s the one key thing that you’ve noticed from the guys that have longevity?’ And he goes, ‘They cut out all the bulls—.'”
That could be van Riemsdyk’s new mantra. The 33-year-old is in the latter half of his career and experiences the body changes that come with it. So even though van Riemsdyk gets “great care” from Philadelphia’s staff, he started exploring how to raise the bar in every health category and ensure more good years ahead on the ice.
“What [that coach] meant was that guys who last are very specific and intentional and targeted about what they’re trying to accomplish,” he said. “That’s training on the ice with skill work, but it’s also nutrition, sleep; they have it all in a good spot. You’ve got to know where your core principles should be. Those aren’t necessarily the flashiest things, but I think those are how you get the best results.”
Gyuran, who also works with van Riemsdyk, said the most common feedback she gets after a client switches diets is they “feel lighter and they can recover faster.” That was the most immediate change van Riemsdyk felt after implementing his own new regime, which includes functional mushrooms for focus, sunflower butter cups for a treat and a wide range of cuisines.
“The two biggest improvements are recovery and energy levels,” he said. “And then just how you sleep and how refreshed you feel waking up. I’ve always been into these sorts of things over the years and different edges you can find, whether it’s supplements or nutrition or training. There are different times where you have to get educated about how to support what you want to try to accomplish, and then how you can supplement your recovery and energy and all the good stuff.”
The process itself requires effort, though. Dr. Stephanie Canestraro is a certified functional medicine doctor and founder of the Vagus Clinic, through which she and her staff work with a wide range of athletes. Canestraro earns new clients via word of mouth from players who have shared her method on expanding good overall health. And that can be extensive. So Canestraro has to see where the commitment level is for each individual.
Basically, how bad do they want to feel good?
“We ask, ‘How many supplements are you willing to take?’ And we ask them how intense they want to be,” she said. “Because if a player gets supplement fatigue, they’ll stop. But when we have a full buy-in, we see results really quickly, even from adding one simple thing. A common issue we see is mitochondrial dysfunction. That’s how your cells make cellular energy. So if we do a test and see an area is low, we can add in one change [with a supplement] and they feel [improvement] right away. The more I explain to them why they’re taking each thing, the better they stick to it, and we try to make it as simple as possible.”
Canestraro said players who remove her protocols in the offseason frequently come back once preseason training ramps up again. It can be difficult to stick with the schedule she provides, but that looming issue of longevity — or lack thereof — brings athletes back.
“They know retrospectively that they felt better on the program,” she said. “And it’s a difference for them between potentially millions of dollars by playing better and getting a better contract the next year, or staying in the NHL and not going down to the AHL. So there’s a lot of stakes, and that’s when they’re usually more willing to really commit.”
Grubauer might be one of those well-paid players at the top of his game, but it isn’t lost on the 30-year-old that everyone has a shelf life. It’s worth embracing the Brussels sprouts to extend it.
“The biggest change since [getting a new food plan] is I think it almost cuts the recovery time in half. You have to take care of yourself to have a long career,” he said. “I introduced a lot of teammates to [different food ideas] because they’d go to McDonald’s after the game to get some food versus getting actually a good meal. That’s something that helps their body to recover and be ready for the next day, and that’s good for all of us.”
THE TORONTO MAPLE LEAFS love blasting music at practice. Behind the scenes, Margaret Hughes is their real master mixologist.
The Leafs’ lead performance dietitian makes it her mission to stave off nutritional boredom for players with an ever-changing playlist of post-workout provisions. It has become Hughes’ thing.
“The guys come off the ice, and I’ve prepared two or three different flavors of recovery shakes,” she said. “They get excited about taking the shake because they don’t know what flavor Margaret has come up with today. I come up with fun names too. I just really try to make food exciting and enjoyable for them as opposed to this traditional vanilla protein shake. In an 82-game regular season, that is going to get old very quickly.”
If there are more options than ever for getting outside help with diet, consider Hughes part of the in-house counsel for Maple Leafs players. About half of the NHL’s 32 clubs have dietitians and nutritionists working daily with players to promote their health goals, whether individually or in tandem with another trusted professional.
“We need to be collaborative,” Hughes said. “Our job is to ensure that every athlete is supported from all angles. My job is basically to complement them and ensure that whatever program is being recommended, I also support that and ensure that the athlete gets the best care that they possibly can. There’s lots of conversations and meetings between many professionals and practitioners.”
Hughes has a wide-ranging role with the Leafs that includes creating menus for the team plane, at hotels on the road and within visiting arenas. Toronto has two cooking staffs — one each at their home and practice rinks — with whom she designs the various plans. Chef Je-Marr Wright is at the helm of bringing Hughes’ culinary visions to life, and he shares her desire to keep things interesting for the players.
“I always try to make sure that September is different than October and then October is always different than November, and that way there’s always a variety of meals,” Wright said. “Players are really conscious about what they put into their body. They’ve definitely taken a big interest in actually knowing what they’re feeding themselves.”
Food is at the heart of Hughes’ focus. On the team side, they’re not providing “pills, powders and potions” so much as fresh fuel for players to choose from that’s readily available when they need it.
“We want to make sure that they’re consuming real food in real time,” she said. “We start with conversations around, ‘What part of the season are we in? What are the training demands? Which individuals may require more carbohydrates, less carbohydrates, more protein, less protein? Is it the day before a game?’
“Then maybe we focus more on carbohydrate-rich foods. Do we have a couple of days in between games? Then we start to look at how we can fit more vegetables and nutrient-dense foods in.”
That includes a keen focus on culturally appropriate meal offerings as well as introducing players to foods they might not have tried before. Wright said he recently added okra to the Leafs’ lunch options, a less familiar vegetable he hoped would land with guys, and perhaps become part of their eating rotation.
It’s a world away from the traditional white-carb-with-a-protein options — which Hughes acknowledges are still a go-to for some — but teams are cognizant of players seeking out nutrition-dense alternatives and have worked hard to provide them.
“The athletes are human, first and foremost. I think my job is to know them as people,” Hughes said. “We have players who come from various cultures, and we also try to understand how ethnic and cultural food preferences or traditional foods fit into their lives. Having access to whatever they need is the best way to optimize an athlete’s nutrition that matches their training demands, at the time that they need it.”
FOOD IS FUEL. Food can also be about pleasure, or having a good time with friends and family.
Even the most dedicated athletes deviate from their meal plan once in a while. But, like Makar making a bad read in front of the net, it doesn’t happen often.
“You allow yourself a few cheat meals,” Makar conceded. “Everybody would be lying if they said you’re eating the exact same way during the summer as you are in the season, for example. But for the most part, you don’t want to lose track of that sense of performance or trust in the eating habits that you have. You never stop doing what you can do to get that edge.”
When Grubauer was selected by Seattle in the 2021 NHL expansion draft after three seasons in Colorado (and nearly that long working with Gyuran) it was “really difficult” being in the Pacific Northwest without access to her meal prep. He actively tried bringing her out to cook for him, and she eventually trained someone Seattle-based in her method so there was a person with whom Grubauer and players like him could work.
“In our schedule and with the timeline during the season, you need to eat as well as you can to fuel your body,” Grubauer said. “And you want to get the best nutrition in order to be 100% the next day and perform at the highest level again and do it over and over again. I’m pretty superstitious, so if I felt like I had a good game, I want the same thing again.”
It’s about removing guesswork. Players spend hours studying video of opponents, searching for weaknesses to exploit and advantages to gain. Now that same focus is being turned onto the players themselves. Opening the door to individualized eating is a natural progression of dedication in athletes craving improvement by that proverbial 1% each day.
“I’m in the mindset that doing the right things is going to lead to better results,” Makar said. “And for me, the mental aspect of it and knowing exactly what you put in your body is a big part of it as well. It’s so important to just have all that super figured out and make sure there’s no surprises in terms of eating anything that I can’t control. You can never really go too wrong with that.”
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Mark Schlabach
OXFORD, Miss. — Before sunrise on Tuesday morning, barely a day after Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin set the college football world ablaze with reports that members of his family had visited Florida and LSU, he went to the one place he figured might cool things down — social media.
In a post on his X account, Kiffin encouraged everyone to “have the best Tuesday ever” and included a photo of a page from Brianna Wiest’s self-development book, “The Pivot Year: 365 Days to Become the Person You Truly Want to Be.”
“How do you know what to do next?” the passage said. “You ask yourself, honestly, what your 90-year-old self would advise you to do. What they would have wished you had done. You ask yourself, honestly, what you’ve sensed from the beginning. What you have ignored, what you have quieted and distracted yourself from.”
Wiest encouraged readers to make two lists, one of the positives and one of the negatives, and weigh them.
“And if there is one thing on the left that overpowers the dozen things on the right, then you trust that,” Wiest wrote. “You ask yourself what path will make you more of the person you are meant to be.”
That is the dilemma 50-year-old Kiffin is facing. He has two potential paths.
Stay at the university in the small Southern town with the small stadium (64,038) and small (but growing) trophy case that gave him a second chance in big-time college football when most others wouldn’t.
Or take a job at a bigger university with a bigger stadium in a bigger city that might provide him with a better opportunity to win an SEC title and national championship.
Who is Kiffin meant to be? The coach who has restored his once-sullied public image and seems genuinely happy living in the same small town as two of his children and his ex-wife? Or the coach whose ego won’t let him pass up an opportunity to coach in a stadium with more than 100,000 seats under the brightest lights and on the biggest stage, while potentially leaving another scorned fan base cursing his name after another ugly exit?
“With Lane, nothing is ever off the table, as you probably know,” a source familiar with the situation told ESPN on Tuesday. “I think that LSU is a real threat. There was so much smoke around Florida, but LSU is the one that really scares you.”
Not long ago, Kiffin was a coach with a checkered past who many athletic directors believed wasn’t worth the risk. Now, he’s the hottest commodity in this season’s coaching carousel after leading the Rebels to a 10-1 record and the No. 6 spot in the College Football Playoff selection committee’s latest rankings.
With one regular-season game left, against rival Mississippi State in the Egg Bowl in Starkville on Nov. 28 (noon ET, ABC), the Rebels are in line to make their first CFP appearance and possibly host a first-round game at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium on Dec. 19 or 20.
“I’m going to say what I’ve done for six years, which is not talk about other jobs and that situation,” Kiffin said during Wednesday’s SEC teleconference. “I love it here and it’s been amazing. And we’re in the season that’s the greatest run in the history of Ole Miss at this point — never been at this point. So I think it’s really exciting, and so I’m just living in the moment that amazing.”
Kiffin has done it with a new quarterback, Trinidad Chambliss, who spent last season at Division II Ferris State in Michigan, and a transfer running back, Kewan Lacy, who leads the FBS with 19 rushing touchdowns. The Rebels are No. 2 in the SEC in total offense (493.8 yards) and passing yards (305.1) and third in scoring (37.2 points).
Indeed, these are heady times for a program that has won only one national championship, in 1960, in the 120-year history of the program. Ole Miss hasn’t captured an SEC title since legendary coach Johnny Vaught guided the team to a 7-1-2 record in 1963, and it hasn’t even played in the SEC championship game since its inception in 1992.
In an interview with “The Pat McAfee Show” on ESPN on Tuesday, Kiffin said he reminds his players that these are the best of times and to enjoy them.
“Hey, those good old days, you’re in them right now,” Kiffin said. “Someday, 10, 20 years from now, you’re going to be saying, ‘Man, remember that run we had at Ole Miss, and we had that Division II quarterback that would make all those plays, and the running back was leading the country in touchdowns, and there was a dog running around on the field and the players were dunking?’
“I said, ‘You’re in the good old days right now, so just have fun, enjoy it,’ and I think if you watch our team, you see them doing that.”
Will the good times last in Oxford, though?
On Sunday, Kiffin’s ex-wife, Layla; his son, Knox; and his brother Chris’ son visited Gainesville, Florida. Layla and other family members visited the LSU campus in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the next day.
On McAfee’s show Tuesday, Kiffin denied that Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter issued an ultimatum for him to decide about his future.
“Yeah, that’s absolutely not true,” Kiffin said. “There’s been no ultimatum, anything like that at all. And so, I don’t know where that came from, like a lot of stuff that comes out there. Like I said, man, we’re having a blast. I love it here.”
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Paul Finebaum: Lane Kiffin not stopping the Florida speculation
Paul Finebaum offers his take on whether Lane Kiffin wants to leave Ole Miss for Florida.
However, sources told ESPN that Carter is pressing Kiffin for clarity about his future by this coming weekend. Is Kiffin staying at Ole Miss or leaving for Florida or LSU?
Kiffin and Carter declined interviews for this story. An Ole Miss spokesperson told ESPN that Carter prefers for both men to focus on beating Mississippi State, which would secure the Rebels the second 11-win season in school history.
When Kiffin was asked Wednesday whether he was aware of any way he wouldn’t coach in next week’s Egg Bowl, he said, “Of course, I’m coaching. I mean, unless you guys know something [that] I don’t. Or I’m getting fired and I don’t know it.”
It’s unclear whether Carter will allow Kiffin to coach the Rebels in a potential CFP game if he decides to leave after the season. Former New York Giants head coach Joe Judge is in his first season as the Rebels’ quarterbacks coach and might be in position to serve as interim coach if Kiffin leaves.
Attorney Thomas Mars, whose clients have included many college coaches and athletic directors, reviewed Kiffin’s contract and found that, under its terms, “Ole Miss can ‘change or reassign [his] duties’ under certain circumstances, which include him ‘seeking or considering’ employment with another school without giving ‘prior written notice’ to the athletics director.”
If Kiffin or his representatives provided Ole Miss with prior written notice that he was talking to Florida and/or LSU, Mars didn’t see anything in the language of the contract that would legally prevent him from coaching in the CFP.
Kiffin’s list of positives for remaining at Ole Miss might be a lengthy one. After spending much of the early part of his career on the West Coast, as an assistant and head coach at USC and head coach of the Oakland Raiders, he has found an unlikely home in Oxford.
The slower pace has been good for him. He no longer drinks alcohol, doesn’t eat red meat or bread, and does hot yoga every morning at 6. In September, Kiffin told ESPN that he spends many Saturday nights eating pizza and watching college football games with his son, who is a sophomore quarterback at Oxford High School, and his friends.
“That’s what you do when you don’t drink,” Kiffin said.
His daughter Landry is a junior at Ole Miss. His younger daughter, Presley, is a freshman at USC and member of the Trojans’ volleyball team.
When Kiffin was asked Wednesday whether he’d be more hesitant to make a job change now that his kids are older, he said, “I do think that people with time change. And maybe when they’re younger, you make really fast decisions, which I’ve gone on record and said that before, in life [and] in situations. And I think as you get older and more mature and look at things differently, maybe you take longer to make the proper decision.”
Kiffin’s off-field behavior raised concerns for administrators during his previous coaching stops at Tennessee and Alabama, where he was an assistant coach under Nick Saban from 2014 to 2016.
He says he has found self-discipline at Ole Miss. He told ESPN that he even leaves his cellphone in his car most mornings.
“I just keep trying to come up with things to challenge discipline,” Kiffin said. “It started in training camp. I told my assistants, ‘You guys are just as bad as these kids. All you guys are addicted to your phones. I’m going to show you.'”
Kiffin might check his cellphone at lunch to make sure there’s not a family emergency or problem involving a player, but otherwise he doesn’t use it again until about 9 p.m.
“It’s awesome,” Kiffin said. “It’s amazing how much more productive you are. Like, until you do it, you don’t realize how much time you waste. And I’m not even a bad phone guy, as some people are.”
On the field, Kiffin has built arguably the best SEC program outside of Alabama and Georgia, at least in terms of victories the past six seasons. The Rebels are 54-19 in his six seasons — only the Crimson Tide (66-12) and Bulldogs (70-8) have more wins in the SEC since the start of the 2020 season. In fact, the Rebels have the eighth-most wins among power-conference teams during that stretch.
If Kiffin were comparing the Rebels to Florida and LSU six years ago, it might have been an easy decision to leave. However, that might not be the case anymore.
Since the start of the 2020 season, the Gators are 36-37. With a 3-7 record so far this season, they will have their fourth losing campaign in the past six years. Urban Meyer led the Gators to national championships in 2006 and 2008, but they’ve cycled through four coaches since he left after the 2010 season. Florida fired Billy Napier on Oct. 19 after his teams went 22-23 in four seasons.
Layla Kiffin, who moved to Oxford earlier this year to be close to two of their three children, is familiar with Gainesville. Her father, John Reaves, was a star quarterback for the Gators from 1969 to 1971. He left as the NCAA’s leading career passer with 7,581 yards and an SEC-record 54 touchdowns. After playing 11 seasons in the NFL, Reaves was an assistant under Steve Spurrier from 1990 to 1994.
LSU has been better than Florida since the start of the 2020 season, with a 46-27 record. The Tigers have lost at least three games in each of the past six seasons after quarterback Joe Burrow led them to a 15-0 record and a national championship in 2019.
Tigers coach Ed Orgeron was fired less than two years later. His replacement, former Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly, was fired Oct. 26 after his teams compiled a 34-14 record in three-plus seasons.
There’s also the current political climate to consider at LSU. Days after Kelly was fired, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry criticized then-LSU athletic director Scott Woodward for agreeing to a 10-year, $95 million contract with Kelly that left LSU on the hook for a $54 million buyout. Woodward stepped down under pressure Oct. 30 and was replaced by longtime LSU athletics administrator Verge Ausberry.
On Nov. 10, Kelly’s attorneys sued LSU’s board of supervisors after the university purportedly notified Kelly that it was seeking to fire him “for cause” to avoid paying his full buyout.
“Crazy doesn’t scare Lane,” a source told ESPN. “That’s probably not going to scare him away.”
A former SEC coach, who hadn’t spoken to Kiffin about the situation, believed Florida and LSU were still better jobs than Ole Miss because of, among other factors, the other schools’ recruiting bases. Kiffin has relied heavily on the transfer portal in building his rosters in the past few seasons; the Rebels brought in 29 transfers this past season.
“It’s really hard to turn over your roster like that every year,” the coach said. “You must be almost perfect in your defensive evaluations, and that’s hard to do. You can’t keep doing it.”
At the very least, though, Ole Miss officials hope the on-field struggles at their SEC rivals will give them a chance to keep Kiffin beyond this season.
“I think he’s going, ‘Well, maybe I can be a national contender here, and they give me everything I want. They let me be me,'” a source familiar with the situation said. “I know that’s easy to say, but, you know, Lane’s not an easy guy. I think we’ve learned how to deal with him and how to manage him and let him be him, and I think he appreciates that. So, yeah, I don’t think we’re out of it by any means.”
If Kiffin leaves Ole Miss, it wouldn’t be the first messy departure in his coaching career. When he abruptly left Tennessee after only 14 months to return to USC as Pete Carroll’s replacement in January 2010, hundreds of students protested outside the football complex, burning a mattress and T-shirts bearing his name.
Kiffin lasted three-plus seasons with the Trojans and was infamously fired in the early-morning hours by athletic director Pat Haden at a private terminal at LAX after an ugly 62-41 loss at Arizona State in the fifth game of the 2013 season.
Then, after Kiffin spent three seasons rebuilding his career as Alabama’s offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach, Saban relieved him of his duties on Jan. 2, 2017, a week before the Crimson Tide were to play Clemson in the CFP National Championship. Steve Sarkisian called the plays in Alabama’s 35-31 loss, and Kiffin left to become the head coach at Florida Atlantic, which had hired him three weeks earlier.
How will things turn out in Oxford? No one knows — at least not yet.
“If there’s one thing about Lane,” a source told ESPN, “it’s that you never know what he’s going to do until he does it.”
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Dan Wetzel
Lane Kiffin will always regret it if he quits on his Ole Miss team.
He’ll always have remorse if he decides to go take another job — Florida or LSU — right on the verge of leading a likely 11-1 Rebels team into the College Football Playoff. He’ll never live down the fact he turned his back on a locker room ready to fight with him for a national title — all for the perceived greener grass of Gainesville or Baton Rouge.
What kind of coach would do that?
This has nothing to do with what job offers more advantages or money or proximity to talent. It has nothing to do with the long term.
Timing is everything in life. Sometimes for the positive, sometimes not. That’s how it works. Adults deal with it.
Kiffin may be free to walk from the Rebels, but everyone else is free to judge him if he does.
If he does, that judgment won’t be positive.
Kiffin, 50, knows drama and setbacks. USC fired him at an airport. Nick Saban bounced him as an Alabama assistant just days before a national title game, convinced he was too focused on his next job as the coach at Florida Atlantic. Al Davis dumped him from the Oakland Raiders and declared he had been “conned” into hiring him in the first place.
Kiffin also knows he has rebuilt his reputation, especially of late in Oxford. A better coach. A better father. A better person. When not discussing football, he talks about how balanced, sober and happy his life has become.
“The whole good old days … I’m in them right now,” Kiffin said Saturday after defeating, coincidentally, Florida. “I just think people don’t realize when they’re in them. And then they get older and they say, ‘Remember that it was great back then?’ You know, I’m just fortunate to be in them.”
Ole Miss is 10-1 heading into next week’s season finale against Mississippi State. The Rebels are primed to host a first-round playoff game, which would arguably be the biggest sporting event in the history of the state. That alone is a seminal moment for a school that has granted its coach every wish it could.
His success has made him a coveted coaching candidate, with two big-time programs seemingly willing to do anything to get him — including ignoring the fact that they are hiring a guy who would walk out on the eve of the postseason.
In a perfect world, this decision would take place after the Ole Miss season. That isn’t how the calendar works, though. UF and LSU need a coach. Returning talent needs to be convinced to stay. Recruits need to be identified.
The high school signing period begins on Dec. 3. The transfer portal opens on Jan. 2.
Ole Miss’ first-round playoff game would occur on Dec. 19 or 20. Win, as Ole Miss would be favored to do, and the quarterfinals are on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day.
For Kiffin, it’s either stay or go. There is no time to do both. Pledge your allegiance to Ole Miss or walk out and start anew. The former might cost him an opportunity that he always wanted. The latter, however, would define him.
The coach who quit on a playoff team? It’s unthinkable.
Kiffin isn’t saying much, other than general comments about how happy he is at Ole Miss.
“We’re having a blast,” Kiffin said Tuesday on “The Pat McAfee Show.” Adding, “I love it here.”
That said, members of Kiffin’s family — including ex-wife Layla and son Knox, a high school sophomore — visited Gainesville and Baton Rouge in recent days, ESPN and others reported. Kiffin says Ole Miss hasn’t given him an ultimatum timeline, but there is no time like the present to make a decision.
Kiffin should stay and see the season out; attempt to win, try to reach the Final Four or beyond, make the memories, and forge the deep bonds that coaching is supposed to be about.
This has nothing to do with the quality of the opportunity at LSU or Florida. Both schools offer immense resources, commitment and potential. Both sit in talent-rich states. Both have advantages that Ole Miss can’t match, although here in the NIL/portal/revenue share era, the gap has closed.
In different circumstances, he could go; maybe he even should go.
Not in these circumstances, though. Not at this time. Not with a team this good, at a school this supportive, in a season this magical.
Certainly not without causing everyone to wonder if Al Davis was right all along.
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