‘It was hard coming back here’: A then-Marshall assistant returns to site of final game before 1970 plane crash
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Chris Low, ESPN Senior Writer
GREENVILLE, N.C. — Dwight Flanagan can still see the faces. He has gone back through old game programs and racked his brain to put the faces with the names.
He simply can’t do it.
It’s been nearly 53 years since Flanagan walked to midfield for the coin toss as one of East Carolina’s captains that crisp Saturday afternoon. He shook hands with the Marshall captains, listened to the head referee’s instructions and returned to the home sideline.
“For 60 minutes, you go against those guys, knocking heads, doing everything you can to beat them, and we’re fortunate enough to win a tough, hard-fought game,” said Flanagan, his voice solemn but steady.
“And then you hear the awful news later that night, news that eats at you to this day, all these years later, that those guys get on an airplane and never make it back.”
Through that tragedy on Nov. 14, 1970, East Carolina and Marshall will forever be linked. All 75 people aboard a chartered Southern Airways DC-9 carrying Marshall players, coaches and fans were killed when the plane returning from a 17-14 loss to ECU slammed into a hillside surrounding Tri-State Airport in Kenova, West Virginia. It remains the deadliest sports-related air disaster in U.S. history.
“I was 6 when the plane crashed, just a couple miles from my home, and my cousins were first responders,” Marshall president Brad D. Smith said. “I remember the mountain glowing red and the sky kind of lighting up at night. And then, of course, hearing all the sirens and everything. It’s just incredible how personal the Marshall story is to everybody.”
On Saturday, the bond that endures between the schools evoked deeply rooted emotions and more than a few tears as 38,211 people gathered at Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium. After a weather delay of an hour and 41 minutes at halftime, Marshall scored 21 unanswered points in the fourth quarter for a 31-13 win.
But the final score was almost an afterthought. More than 30 East Carolina players from the 1970 game returned to campus to pay tribute to their fallen opponents from more than a half century ago. (A similar ceremony had been planned for the fall of 2020, 50 years after the crash, but was canceled because of COVID-19.) Some of those players hadn’t been back in decades.
“I’m still not over it, not sure I ever will get over it,” said George Whitley, a senior co-captain and defensive back on the 1970 ECU team. “I think I’ve been back here for a game maybe one other time, but I wasn’t going to miss this one.”
On the Marshall side, it was the first time Red Dawson had been back since the 1970 game. Dawson, the Thundering Herd’s defensive coordinator, didn’t get on the team plane that night and instead drove to Ferrum College in Virginia for a recruiting visit along with freshman coach Gail Parker, who had flown down with the team but traded seats with assistant coach “Deke” Brackett, who had driven to Greenville with Dawson.
Just as the rain started to come down Saturday, the 80-year-old Dawson gingerly walked out onto the field during a timeout in the first quarter. The players from East Carolina’s 1970 team presented him with a game ball they had all signed. Dawson pointed at each of them, nodded and mouthed the words “Thank you.”
Dawson, who still lives in Huntington, West Virginia, was a central figure in the 2006 film “We Are Marshall.” He and his wife, Sharon, drove to Greenville for the game last weekend after visiting the South Carolina coast. Dawson was only 28 when the crash occurred, not a lot older than many of the players he coached. For more than 30 years, he said, he was unable to escape the horror of it all and essentially went into a shell.
“Hell, I didn’t want to see anybody or talk to anybody, let alone talk about that game or remember anything about it. I just couldn’t,” said Dawson, who is still recovering from a stroke suffered three years ago. “I think I went to 27 funerals. You can’t imagine that kind of pain, seeing all those families who lost the people they love the most.
“It was hard coming back here. I didn’t know if I ever could.”
Dawson, wearing his green and white Marshall pullover, played over and over in his mind what it was going to feel like walking out on that field again. Some of the anguish he had purposely locked away came creeping back.
But not all of it. He maintained his razor-sharp wit throughout the weekend. Told that he was a lot better-looking than the actor, Matthew Fox, who played him in the movie, Dawson smiled wryly and said, “Now I know you’re bulls—ting me.”
Just before kickoff Saturday, Dawson stood adjacent to the end zone with Sharon at his side and gazed 100 yards in the other direction toward the visiting locker room. Just outside the stadium on that side is a memorial plaque that was installed in 2006 to honor the 1970 Thundering Herd. The plaque reads in part: “Their flight to eternity forever changed the lives of those who dearly loved them. … They shall live on in the hearts of their families and friends forever.”
The Marshall administration invited Red and Sharon Dawson to fly to the game with the team last weekend.
“But he said no, not this game and not here,” Sharon said.
As it turned out, Marshall’s plane had trouble landing at the Greenville airport on Friday before the game because of storms in the area. The plane circled the airport and was diverted to Richmond, Virginia, to refuel before returning to Greenville.
Dawson did stay at the hotel with the team, and when he and Sharon retired to the room that evening, they flipped on the television, and “We Are Marshall” was playing.
“We watch it every year now,” Sharon said. “Red usually makes it to the part where the screen goes black [when the plane goes down] before he starts crying.”
With the long weather delay, most of Saturday’s crowd had left by the time the second half resumed. Red and Sharon held out as long as they could, and Marshall coach Charles Huff reminded his players what this game means to so many.
“We talked to the team before the game that the way you honor someone is by how you do something,” Huff said.
Saturday’s win was Marshall’s first in Greenville in eight tries.
KEITH MOREHOUSE, WHOSE father, Gene, was killed in the crash, was also presented with a game ball during the ceremony. Gene was the radio voice for the Thundering Herd and the team’s sports information director in 1970. His son has followed in his footsteps, as Keith is the longtime sports director at WSAZ-TV, the NBC affiliate in Huntington.
It was only the sixth ECU-Marshall game in Greenville since the crash in 1970, and Morehouse had attended a few of the previous matchups. On one of those trips, he was able to go up into the old visiting team broadcast booth.
“The booths have all been redone with the stadium expansion, but they took me to the one Dad would have been in while calling his last game,” Morehouse said. “The footprint of the stadium is the same as it was in 1970, so as you walk onto the field, thoughts wash over you.”
A few years ago, some of the ECU players on the 1970 team sent Morehouse the original film from the game, and his colleagues at the television station spliced the audio of his father’s radio call with the game film.
Morehouse won an Edward R. Murrow regional award for best news documentary in 2020 with his report “A Change of Seasons: Fifty Novembers Ago.” He interviewed some of the ECU players for the piece and was struck by how it had impacted them.
“I guess we’ve all mourned in different ways,” said Morehouse, whose wife, Debbie, lost both of her parents in the crash.
Her father, Ray Hagley, was the team doctor and only 34 at the time of his death. Her mother, Shirley, was flying with her husband for the first time, traveling without their six children. Many of the fans on the plane were among the most prominent leaders in the community. There were 18 children who became orphans after losing both parents on the doomed flight.
Morehouse, 62, still has a picture from that game that shows part of the stands.
“You can pick out some of the family members, and you can see my wife’s father in one of the pictures,” he said.
Dawson, who never returned to coaching after the 1972 preseason, has blocked out much of what happened 53 years ago. Some of those memories he doesn’t want to recall, and others he’s relieved that he can’t recall because of the effects of his stroke.
What he does remember from that game 53 years ago, similar to the ECU players, are the faces of the Marshall players as they made their way off the field. He remembers some of the fans mingling around the locker room. And, yes, he remembers being peeved over the loss.
“We should have won the damn game,” Dawson said grimacing. “That’s what everybody was thinking.”
But a football game was the last thing on Dawson’s mind hours later as he and Parker hopped back in the car after visiting a prospect. They were listening to the car radio when they heard the news.
“Shock, total shock,” Dawson said. “I don’t know where we were or even what time it was. I just know we stopped the car and sat there and stared at each other. Neither one of us could say a word. We just stared. I couldn’t tell you how long. It seemed like forever.”
Back in Greenville, ECU coach Mike McGee came barreling through the dormitory late that night yelling for everybody to gather in the student center for an impromptu meeting.
“A lot of us were downtown trying to find a beer like most college kids. We were celebrating. We didn’t win many games that season,” said Richard Peeler, an all-conference defensive tackle for the team. “When Coach McGee finally got us all together that night, we went to pieces.”
Rusty Scales remembers being summoned by a graduate assistant, and for him, the news hit especially hard. Scales, a fullback on that ECU team, played high school football in New Jersey against Marshall quarterback Teddy Shoebridge and running back Art Harris. Scales played at Passaic Valley High, Harris at Passaic High and Shoebridge at Lyndhurst High.
“I stood over there with Teddy talking for a few minutes, talking about coaches and people we knew in New Jersey, some of the high school teams,” Scales recalled. “We talked long enough that our coaches were calling us off the field to the locker rooms.
“And just like that, you hear he’s gone, all of them. You just couldn’t believe it.”
The ECU team held a memorial service early the next morning at the Wright Auditorium on campus. The Pirates’ season was over, but Marshall had one more game remaining against Ohio University that weekend.
McGee, who died in 2019, was in his only season at East Carolina as coach before moving on to Duke. He called Peeler into his office Monday morning after the crash to see what his thoughts were about ECU potentially filling in for Marshall in its final scheduled game as a way to honor the players and coaches who lost their lives.
“We were going to wear their uniforms and any revenue we made would have gone to Marshall, but the NCAA wouldn’t let us do it,” Peeler said. “We were just looking for ways to do anything we could to help.”
AS SATURDAY’S GAME approached, the players and coaches who played in that 1970 game were hardly the only ones who found their minds racing — and their hearts aching.
Shoebridge’s older brother, Tom Shoebridge, had to pause several times to gather himself when recalling his final telephone conversation with his brother. Tom, who spends most of his time now at the New Jersey shore, was unable to make the trip to Greenville, but he connected a few years ago with some of the ECU players.
“Give those guys a big hug. We don’t shake hands in Jersey. We hug,” said Shoebridge, who retired in 2019 after more than 40 years of coaching track and football at his high school alma mater, the same school his late brother Teddy starred at in both football and baseball.
On Sundays when Teddy was at Marshall, he would call home collect. Tom said he, younger brother Terry and their parents would pass the phone around to talk to him.
“It was that or writing letters. We couldn’t talk long, either, because those collect calls were expensive,” Tom said. “But I’ll always remember him asking me about one of our biggest wins in high school, wanting to know all about our game and how excited he was for me. It was never about him.”
His voice cracking, Tom added, “I didn’t know that would be the last time I would talk to him.”
Whenever Tom hears that Marshall is going to be playing East Carolina, he said it brings him back to the day of Nov. 14, 1970.
“It’s not a good place to be sometimes,” Tom said. “I think about many, many things. As a coach, I think about the kids on that plane. They’d just lost a tough game. As a brother, I think about Teddy and what he was thinking before he died.”
Senior defensive end Owen Porter is Marshall’s defensive leader and one of the top players in the Sun Belt Conference. Saturday’s game was his first trip to Greenville. His grandparents, Don and Joyce Hampton, lived less than a mile from the crash site in Kenova. From the time he was a little boy, he’d heard stories about that fateful night and how the community rallied to support each other.
“They lived in a little white brick house right there at the time,” Porter said. “When the plane hit the mountain, it shook the walls, knocked pictures off the walls, shook stuff in bookcases, and there was broken glass and stuff on the floor.
“Marshall is who I am. It’s part of me and my family … always.”
Julia Keller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, was born and raised in Huntington. Her father was a math professor at Marshall and kept statistics at the football and basketball games. Keller would tag along as a young girl.
“I thought I was the queen of the world getting to sit there on press row and in the press box, and oh my gosh, that I knew Gene Morehouse,” Keller remembered. “My father and I shared a love of sports, and I know that crash affected him so profoundly because he knew a lot of those players and had them in class, and he knew the townspeople who were killed too.”
Soon after taking a job with the Chicago Tribune, Keller talked her editors into letting her write a story about the crash in 1999. She spent more than a month working on it, and one of the things that sticks with her was a visit she had with Teddy Shoebridge’s mother, who was dying of pancreatic cancer.
“I was so moved and touched when I went there. She had not been out of her bed for months,” said Keller, who was 13 when the plane crashed. “She came out into the living room, and we sat around the table and talked about Ted. She essentially got herself up out of what was her death bed to talk about her beloved son.”
Shoebridge’s mother died a few weeks after Keller’s story was published. When Keller realized that Marshall was playing at East Carolina this season, she immediately thought of that rainy, foggy night as a frightened 13-year-old and the unspeakable grief that consumed her hometown.
“It does change, the grief,” Keller said. “It goes from a very, very sharp edge, but I wouldn’t say it ever lessens.”
Earl Taylor was a member of the drumline in the ECU marching band in 1970. His wife, Pam, who joined the flag corps the following year, was also at the game in the stands. Taylor went on to earn three degrees at ECU, and to this day, he struggles to wrap his brain around the fact that he watched those players exit the field, but they never made it home.
“I think everybody on our campus was thinking the same thing, ‘We just played that team, and now they’re gone,'” Taylor said. “We won the game, but they lost their lives.
“It just couldn’t be.”
When the last of the Marshall players came straggling out of the locker room toward the team buses Saturday, the rain had just about stopped. Caleb McMillan, a junior receiver from Orlando, Florida, walked outside the gate with his headphones sitting atop his head. He turned to his left and was facing the plaque memorializing his Herd football brethren from more than 50 years ago. He took a picture with his cell phone and gently placed his hand on the plaque.
“We won’t forget,” he said softly.
It was McMillan’s 75-yard touchdown reception — another tribute of sorts to the “75” — that turned the game in Marshall’s favor.
But on this rainy night, it was little more than a footnote.
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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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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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