Andy & Ari On3 - Ole Miss-Mississippi State INSTANT REACTION | Recapping the Egg Bowl | What will Lane Kiffin Decide?

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

As Week 14 is officially underway, Black Friday's slate started off with a classic rivalry game in Starkville: the Egg Bowl. As Ole Miss and Mississippi State battle it out at Davis-Wade Stadium, all eyes are on Lane Kiffin and his decision. As Florida is reported to be out of the Lane Kiffin sweepstakes, it's now down to Ole Miss and LSU. What will Coach Kiffin decide after the Egg Bowl? Find out here as Andy & Ari breakdown this classic SEC rivalry here. This show is presented by Modelo! Some things in life are just made for each other. Peanut Butter and jelly. Macaroni and cheese. Modelo and college football. If you’re watching this, it means you live and breathe football. All season long. You know what that makes you? A Full-Time Fan. Which means you deserve a Modelo. Because football wouldn’t be the same without you. Modelo is the official beer sponsor of The College Football Playoff. Drink responsibly. Beer imported by Crown Imports, Chicago, IL Our show is also presented by BetMGM! If you haven’t signed up for BetMGM yet, use bonus code CFB and you will get up to a $1500 First Bet Offer on your first wager with BetMGM! Here’s how it works: 1. Download the BetMGM app and sign-up using bonus code CFB.2. Deposit at least $10 and place your first wager on any game.3. You will receive up to $1500 in bonus bets if your bet loses! Just make sureyou use bonus code CFB when you sign up! Make this college football season one for the history books. Make it legendary. See BetMGM.com for Terms. 21+ only. US promotional offers not available in New York, Nevada, Ontario, or Puerto Rico. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER (Available in the US). Call 877-8-HOPENY or text HOPENY (467369) (NY). Call 1-800-NEXT-STEP (AZ), 1-800-327-5050 (MA), 1-800-BETS-OFF (IA), 1-800-981-0023 (PR). First Bet Offer for new customers only. Subject to eligibility requirements. Rewards are non-withdrawable bonus bets that expire in 7 days. In partnership with Kansas Crossing Casino and Hotel. Join On3 today and get one full year of access to The Athletic included! https://www.on3.com/subscribe/C Watch our show on YouTube! https://youtube.com/live/0Otf97KPIDs Hosts: Andy Staples, Ari WassermanProducer: River Bailey Interested in partnering with the show? Email [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to a special instant reaction edition of Andy and Ari on three presented by BedMGM from BedMGM. We are at the MGM, Grand in Detroit, just outside the sports book. Ari, this is a wonderful place. This is the happiest place on earth. That's my heaven. I don't know like what would go on. I mean, I guess if you got barbecue brought in here, maybe that would be the best for you. We got a bunch of games on still here. We got an NFL game on. And we just got done watching the Egg Bowl together. Yes, we did. And most importantly, we watched Lane Kippen's post-game interview. Even more interesting than his halftime interview, which is saying something,

he said, I've got a lot of praying to do before I make a decision tomorrow. What does that mean? He's got a lot of praying to do. Let me ask you this. Did you find that believable? There seems to be a split on the Internet between people who, I don't believe a single thing that that man says, or, you know, that seems pretty, you know, authentic to me. Where do you land on that?

And it, I wonder what your, what your take on that is. All right. So apparently your mic has gone out, by the way. So we'll share mics. I won't interrupt you now. So here's my thing. I feel like if you're staying in Ole Miss, one, it will be very hard to get in front of those players right now,

which Lane Kiffin has done his post-game interview. He's probably talking to the team right now, which has got to be weird. Like if you're thinking you're going to leave or that you might leave, that's a strange place to be. So if you were going to stay, wouldn't you just be like,

you do the Jordan Belford speech? You're like, I'm not leaving. I'm not leaving. Yeah, I mean, I think we keep trying to figure out what the normal person would do. And I think that if he were staying or he knew for, I think we would know,

now if we knew if he knew he was staying in his heart i think we would know by now there would have been plenty of opportunity to troll the layton kippin away between now and the end of that game what i wonder is is if he is really thinking hard about lSU wanted to get through this game and then wanted to take tonight or the weekend to figure it out they have like the real all the information am i going to the playoff is my team going to be where i think it's going to be all these different factors that I think we've been talking about the last two weeks have kind of crystallized now. And if he had been given the opportunity, the extension, which was given to us through the release that they gave, said after the Egg Bowl, if he knew that he was

going to have tonight and tomorrow to figure that out, I can see why a person would probably try to do that. I don't know that he knows right now. So Ratchet-Dwan in the chat says, wasn't he supposed to announce by now? No, he was not. The release we got last Friday said he would announce something on Saturday. And, you know, it, it didn't say after the egg bowl? No, it said Saturday. It said the next day. So that's the question is, is, you know, is it some glorious troll where he's going to come

out tomorrow and say, just kidding, I'm staying here. And now I've messed up Florida in LSU searches. So that's going to hurt their recruiting. And, you know, now I can get more good players to come to. Ole Miss to come to the sip and then we're going to go to the playoff together. But I don't think that's what happened. I think what happened is he was looking at Florida and LSU and was genuinely surprised when he found out that the Ole Miss people were not going to let him stay and coach the

playoff if he was leaving. Yeah. And that makes sense to me too. And I wonder if there's a little aspect of can you win 11 games at Ole Miss? You know now definitively that you can because you've done it. And you go through your process with the information that you have. have which is it's a completed season we have 11 wins we're going to the college football playoff is this something that is sustainable here long term or do i have to go to field this again

and you know honestly speaking yeah i'm not trying to throw shade at anything here but the florida news that we got on friday morning shouldn't have really taken very many people by surprise you and i have broken this down quite a bit on our show about the gaps between the florida job and the old miss job and i think 10 years ago as one of our friends and listeners joseph pointed out before the show when we were talking to him said, you know, maybe 10 years ago, Florida was a huge gap between Ole Miss. Now, very much less so, but I still think that LSU is a gap. It might have been tightened a little bit.

There's still a gap there. And I'm wondering if he is contemplating in the moment as he basks in the glory of doing something that Ole Miss hasn't done, is this something I can do over and over again here, or do I have to move, relocate, change my life, start over to do this again somewhere else? well and that's the question now but also the question is can you say to these guys peace out enjoy the playoff i'll see you later like that's how hard is that going to be to say yeah i mean we've done this analogy all you know the last three weeks if you're uh restoring an old car do you want to get it give it away before you drove it if you're building something

building a house you want to sell it before you live in it like i just but at the same time if somebody says hey you know the house that your building's awesome but you can build a new one on ocean front property and yours is in the middle of nowhere, you might take that opportunity. So, you know, it's really, really hard. I feel like with coaching, it's such a personal profession, Andy. I don't think people realize through recruiting, even in the NIL era, you get close to these guys.

You get close to your assistance, maybe some of which would come with you, maybe some players would come with you. But to not to be able to see something through that you, this is the culmination of everything he's done. This isn't just a one year thing. This is the culmination of everything he's built there. steely dean says what florida news so let's catch let's catch the folks up who haven't heard this so florida has focused its search away from lane kiffin because they don't think they're

going to get lane kiffin our pete naco's and chris low and brettman murphy reporting that they have focused on john somerall that doesn't mean they're hiring john somerall neslusarily because here's the thing auburn's still going after john summerall o'miss could be going after john summerall if old miss opens which we don't know if old miss is going to open until i guess lane kiffin decides tomorrow yeah uh there's going to be a team out of these three that's kind of left holding the bag because there's only two coaches in contention for three jobs right now it'll be very interesting to see what that third team does in terms of what their hire is um but yeah i think that now that you're able to kind of

boil it down to two with lane kiffin you really are just deciding do i need to upgrade my house or am I happy in the house that I live in? Yeah, it is such a, it's such a strange thing because I'm still trying to figure out, like if he comes up and says, I'm going to LSU, how does that work? I'm assuming Ole Miss's first call would be to John Sumerall. And then if you're John Sumerall, that means you just drive up the price on everybody. Yeah. The longer you hold out and the more people want you, the higher the price for you is.

But though, I wonder how much. Lane Kiffin said in the market as the highest paid because he's going to be the highest paid coach when he signs his contract. I don't know how long that's going to last because Kirby Smart and Ryan Day are probably going to want some extra money when that happens. But how much of an impact does Lane Kiffin being the highest paid coach in this cycle have on a guy like John Summerall's ability to ask for what he could ask for? Well, and the thing is a couple guys have come off the board.

So Eli Drinkwitz does an extension and tweets that out on Thanksgiving Day. and then Clark Lee on Black Friday does an extension with Vanderbilt. So they're off the board. I don't know how many other guys we're going to see come off the board. And remember, there's still jobs open elsewhere. But in terms of the candidate pool, the most similar jobs are Florida, Auburn, and either LSU or Ole Miss, depending on which one is open tomorrow. Yeah, and we were talking about this before the game,

but it does kind of feel like there's all these jobs open and really only three candidates that we're talking about, two candidates that have, like, kind of taken up all the oxygen. And there are other coaches out there that I think could do a very good job. So I'm wondering, once the dust settles with Lane, where he picks and who the coach that's hired to replace him at one of the other two schools is hired, like, if we can actually start having a functional conversation about some other candidates out there that might be good for these jobs. Well, I can tell you right now, obviously, I have lots of fellow Florida grads in my contacts list.

And the text messages have not been kind since that news broke. And I don't think they're going to be real thrilled with John Somerall, which is interesting because I actually think there's a reason that he's Auburn's first choice. There's a reason he'll be Ole Miss's first choice if they leave. But people don't like the guy who's like the last guy. The real question that we're going to have to have, we should do one mic more often. It's kind of nice on both sides. It is not.

How would you rank those three? The jobs? Yeah, like if it comes down to Georgia, I mean, Florida, Ole Miss, and Auburn, that's an interesting three-way ranking there. Well, so John Summerall is actually from Alabama originally, he's from Huntsville. So I would think that works in Auburn's favor. He's worked at Ole Miss before, so that probably works in Ole Miss's favor. Florida probably would be considered the best job of the three if we were just objectively ranking them. Yeah, yeah.

But so anyway, the other thing I wanted to point out on this video, Andy, is that this game, the Egg Bowl, like, we didn't get the on-the-field grab-ass that we usually get in the game. We literally got on the field kick-ass. We got fighting on the field. We got Lane Kiffin and Mississippi State 80s, Zach Selman yelling at each other as a brawl was happening in the game. But if that was Lane Kiffin's final game as Ole Miss's head coach, and you have to put that out there as a possibility, obviously. the pregame speech about the the thefts in the locker room the brawl at half time the way lane kiffin processed and delivered his viewpoint on that information during both interviews the pregame and the halftime interview at least it was an unapologetically authentic lane kiffin experience it was it was okay so he said he's got to pray well how's that prayer go dear god who should i let pay me 14 million dollars

a year. Do I like crawfish better or fried catfish better? I mean, I think, you know, I'm always the jokester on this, but on a serious level, the guy is always tweeting out devotional and inspirational things that you read through the divine. I went to church with the guy. You know that, right? I've gone to church with Lane Kiffin before. I would love to hear all about that. Is now the time or after we're done recording? We can talk about it. He was at FAU. I was doing a story on him, and I was in the hotel gym that Sunday morning, and I get a text from Lane Kiffin. Want to call? come to church with me i was like yes i do absolutely i mean what were the vibes in there the vibes

were immaculate he had a good time he had a bunch of his players there it was very cool he was very locked in he was taking notes yeah so i mean if you are somebody who is reading and participating in the good word every morning and you're consuming that then i think that you know what you actually the prayer that i would think that it would be is lord i have all these great options I'm conflicted personally on some of the connections that I have at Ole Miss. I'm also excited about the opportunity to do something new at a place that's traditionally been a bigger job. Please help me see what's the right path for me. All right, Ari.

I'm going to ask you to play God. What's the answer? If you are thundering down from the heavens to tell Lane Kiffin what you think you should do, Lane Kiffin, this is God. I think you should. I don't like that you use thundering. because I don't want to get struck by lightning in here right now in the bed MGM. But, Andy, I think I would tell him to stay.

I think that being a climber, I'm a climber. You know, my entire career, I've always wanted to... I'm imagining you on a ladder now. I'm not that type of climbing. I think it's always interesting, and I actually struggle with this myself, because if you go back and you look at my career trajectory, I first started off at rivals. I don't know if you know that was my first job.

the rival's website in Columbus, Ohio. And I was like, you know what? I don't want to be a beatwriter for a team site anymore. I want to go do newspapers. So then I got a fan site newspaper called Buckeye Sports Bulletin. And then when I got there, I was like, I don't want to be a fan newspaper person anymore. I want to go work at a big newspaper. Cleveland Plain Dealer calls, and I'm happy there for a month.

Then I'm there for three years. I'm like, I don't want to be a beatwriter for the rest of my life. Then the athletic calls. Then I'm a beat writer. writer there that I'm at the athletic for a year and I'm already wanting to be a national writer and then at the athletic and it just keeps going and going and going and then I steal you for on three but then here I am a national writer at a team site um but I this is the last the first job that I've had maybe in my entire professional career where I haven't been

woken up a year into it with a burning desire for what's next but let me ask you let me ask you if someone if another company that is considered comparable to to where we are now offers you the same amount of money but there may be considered a little bit more prestigious but you're having great success here now and and and shan and tarry might be watching this and it's but it's this it's going to be the same money because because on three is going to match you've built this thing you've helped build this thing in on three the other people place already built. Somebody already won the national championships. What are you going to do? It would be like if ESPN started and said, hey, we're going to start a podcast around you.

And the upside of that is maybe one day you could be on college game day, right? That I, and then I would have to leave. At on three, we might actually take over like in 10 years, people might watch our show instead of college game day at the, at the trajectory to on three is on. And you're missing something here. In order for me to take this new job, I can't cover the playoff with you. Right. I was so I'll never talk to you again I would stay in that scenario especially because the money drives the world Andy because like the thing that we can't separate when we're talking about this stuff is LSU has typically been a better job not only because of the upside and

the ability to win a national title they also paid more like in this is this is different because it doesn't pay it's not going to pay anymore one's not going to pay more than the other right so I think that like if you neutralize the finances and you have the ability to look at yourself and go you know i like doing hot yoga in oxford i like these uniforms i like these guys i like hot yoga and oxford's got to be pretty hot i'm not going to lie even as a happily married man i got to say hot yoga in oxford has to be hot gunner stockton threw an interception on george's first possession so uh that's something to keep trouble you know but yeah i i don't think that it's as cut and dry it

used to be. And like Lane Kiffin is a pretty successful, cool dude in Ole Miss, lets him be himself. I don't know. There's nothing that you can't do at Ole Miss or that you can do at LSU that you can't do at Ole Miss. Well, we're going to find out if he thinks that or not, because if he wakes up tomorrow and says, I'm going LSU, he doesn't think that. He thinks that there are things you can do at LSU that you can't do at Ole Miss. The one thing you can't do at LSU in the 2025 season is coaching the playoff. You can do that at Ole Miss. It's a pretty big selling point to me.

Our watch continues. When Layton makes a decision, you'll hear from us. But also, after this next set of games, you'll hear from us. We got Georgia and Georgia Tech clean, old-fashioned hate right now. We'll talk to you after the game.