The Josh Innes Show - Lane Kiffin's Return To Ole Miss

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

I need Ole Miss people to be total meatheads on Saturday. I need projectiles. I need the game to be stopped to clean garbage off the field. This is the game of the year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaking of sideline reporters, I am excited to see that there is one pregame interview that I'm excited about ever. And that one pregame interview that I'm excited about is Lane Kiffin's pregame interview. That's the interview I'm excited about at Ole Miss this week. Now again, who knows what he's going to say? It's not going to be, like, that's probably not going to be interesting. But the game itself is. Like, you know, you don't have to care about LSU or Ole Miss to understand that, LSU Ole Miss is going to be the greatest theater ever.

Like, think about this. Whenever Lane Kiffin went back to Tennessee, it was a huge deal. Mind you, when he went back to Tennessee, I was living in Nashville at the time, so I guess that would have been 2001 or 2002. Sorry, 2012 or 2022. So he had been gone from Tennessee for 15 years, right? Because I think he left there in 07, right? because he left Tennessee.

What was his order of events? Was Lane the, so did he go to, I should know this, I've watched the documentary, but I want to say he was the coach at, he was the coach for the Raiders, and that was later. So was he the coach at Tennessee, whether he left for the,

whatever it was. Point being, it was well over a decade that Lane Kiffin had been gone from Tennessee. And by the way, he was in Tennessee for, what equated to five minutes. He was basically there for a cup of coffee. And the reaction that Lang Kiffin got when he came back to Tennessee was people throwing shit. There were golf balls being thrown at him. Like who just let somebody bring a golf ball? Not that, you know,

they let them bring the golf ball in, but like guys just have golf balls in their fucking pockets. What is this? Philadelphia. Is he fucking J.D. Drew? But if you go back and look at that, that was fantastic television. I mean, the guy's getting pelted with shit. They're delaying the game, all that. And that's just a dude that was there for five minutes. And I think those people were doing that just for the show of it. These are people that are legit pissed off. These are people who are still seething. They're foaming at the mouth. They're angry. It's fresh. It's raw. It's like this is, we're being given a gift. LSU Ole Miss is a gift. And I've seen people like there have been stories I've seen written about how LSU has been in primetime three consecutive nights to start the season. You know, other teams would like to have night games too.

Eat shit. No one cares about your shitty team. You know, Missouri, no one gives a fuck about you. You can play at 7.30 in the morning every week and nobody would give a fuck. No one cares about a Missouri or a Kansas or a South Carolina. There's a handful of teams in college football that are the gigantic television draws. Bama. And like there's an upper tier.

Alabama, Texas, Ohio State, you know, Georgia. And there's teams that are there that are right on the cusp of there, the LSU's teams like that. Penn State is probably in that category, if I had to guess. You know, there are teams that are nice draws that are the big stars of television. And then there's a bunch of other people that, look, you're just going to play where we tell you to play because nobody gives a fuck about you. And we're in the business of getting eyeballs.

We're not in the business of charity. We're not in the business of putting, you know, Missouri, Arkansas Pine Bluff in primetime. Go play a better team. You know why LSU is in primetime week one? They're playing at home against Clemson. Now they beat the shit out of them. Clemson probably sucks now, but it's not like they played Arkansas Pine Bluff to start the season. They played Clemson. That's why they were on the primetime game and everybody saw them and they weren't buried on the SEC Network's 15th tier channel because they were playing against Mercer. They were playing a game against a meaningful opponent. That's why they were on TV. They were on SEC Network last week, right?

That wasn't the prime game on television. That was Texas and Ohio State, as it should have been. Then you fast forward to week three. They're going to be in a primetime game and they're going to get, they're going to have a game day there and everything. Why? Because LSU is a relevant brand and Lane v. Ole Miss is the biggest story of the college football season.

Texas and Ohio State played and Texas rallied from 21 points down to win. Does not matter. That is not the biggest story of the year. The biggest story is the drama surrounding Kiffin because Kiffin is a guy that people universally either love or hate. I currently love him because he coaches my fucking team. If he didn't coach my team, I'd probably fucking hate him. But he coaches my team and I love it because it gives our team an identity.

It gives us a bit of a swagger about us. People know who we are. We're not just existing. LSU spent too many years just existing. Won a lot of games, but didn't have an identity. The last time LSU had a true identity, I wouldn't even say necessarily it was when they won the national championship because that was kind of a one-off thing under O.

Now they had the idea under less miles of being fucking nasty defense and run the ball. That was kind of the identity. But now it's a team being built in the image of Lane Kiffin. And now like when you come around, people hate you because you're LSU and being hated fucking rules in the sports world because that means you're doing something right. Very few people are hated in sports and suck. other than Pat McAfee.

He's an example of people who I don't understand and then people hate them. But most of the time people hate you because you're doing something significant. That's how this works. And LSU is currently doing something significant. But I'm seeing all these people, bitch about,

how's LSU playing at night all the time? Well, because they fucking are. So tough shit, get over it. I don't know what other games are on the schedule this week. Not one of those games will have the storyline that they're going to have with LSU.

Yeah, that's right. Let's take LSU going to Ole Miss and Lane Kiffing coming back to Kiffin coming back to Ole Miss. Let's put that at 11 o'clock right alongside, you know, Ohio State Toledo. Let's put that there. No thanks. This is the biggest football game of the year. It's going to be a ratings bonanza, especially if the Ole Miss people come through with

throwing shit and other stuff. And now they're doing a little angle, and I've heard it in their media there. And their angle is. well we don't really care it's not that big of a deal to us and we're just going to kind of ignore it and not make it about Lane right and Lane makes it all about himself and we're not going to make it about that the fuck they will they're going to spend all day getting plastered in the grove and getting lubed up you know the money people are spending on these tickets like the cheapest get-in ticket for that game right now let me see let's find the cheapest get-in ticket uh let's see oh let's see Ole Miss L LSU tickets. Let's see what the cheapest on the secondary market is. Let's go look at Stubhub here, which is a horrible site. You should never use Stubhub. I've had nothing but problems with it. So let's see. Let's look up LSU on Stubhub. LSU Tigers football. Can you show me Ole Miss please? I don't need to see LSU home games. All right. Show me Ole Miss. Old Miss football.

Tigers at Ole Miss, September 19th. The cheapest get-it. in ticket. You want to get a pair of tickets. The cheapest ticket to get in to get two seats is currently $500. That's the cheapest get in ticket. Now that'll go down. It'll get slightly more realistic. I was reading that the Airbnbs are going for 24, $2,500.500 pop because, look, Oxford, Mississippi is not a place that's loaded with places to stay. A lot of times, like, the teams stay in Memphis and drive to Oxford. Like, this is not a place that's loaded with places to stay. It's a small place. Rhode Island could kick the crap out of it in a war. This is not a big place we're talking about here. So it's, um, this is going to be a big deal. And to tell you that

it's going to be a big deal, which is an obvious statement, but the idea that like, LSU gets all these prime time games, because they're a brand that matters, their coach matters. You've made their coach matter because you hate him. You've made LSU more relevant. LSU was already a major relevant program that's probably among the top five, six, seven brands in college football when it comes to television ratings and everything else. They're one of the biggest brands when it comes to NIL shit and national recognition and people making money playing at their school and putting pros in multiple sports. Like bless your heart, Ole Miss, nobody gives a fuck about you. Ole Miss is an out-of-sight, out-of-mind program that was essentially

brought back from the dead by Lane Kiffin. When was the last? When was the last, the last time Ole Miss was truly relevant before Lane Kiffin was there. And like they had years where they won some games. But I'm talking when they were relevant. When people talked about them on the national stage and people talked about them like they were something. Prior to Lane Kiffin, when was it? The 60s?

Like when was it? The 70s? One of the 80s. One in the 90s. You had a couple of years with Eli Manning when, oh, by the way, LSU beat you for the SEC West Championship and you still claim the SEC West. You put up a banner to celebrate a tie in the SEC West, even though you lost to LSU. Who won it? The most significant thing that happened for Ole Miss football in the last 30-something years is Eli Manning falling down in a game. So you can sit there and get all angry about Lane

and get angry about how LSU's on TV all the time and it's bullshit that LSU's on TV all there. This is the game. God, I can't wait for this. I'm chubbed up for this game. You know, like I just I was listening to the governor of Louisiana, who for whatever reason I find charming. Like, I don't necessarily agree with him politically because, you know, whatever. I would agree with him more politically, probably than I would agree with some, you know, wacky liberal politically. But it's not like I think he's some brilliant politician. But it's weird. If you know who Huey Long is, Huey Pierce Long, the one-time governor of Louisiana,

who is responsible for getting Tiger Stadium built by saying, we'll put dorms in the stadium, and that's how the stadium got built. That's why they were dorms in Tiger Stadium. Like, that's the kind of shit that Huey Long did. Got assassinated. There's still like a bullet hole in the wall at the state capital. But this guy gives off Huey Long vibes, you know? Like, he just, like, I feel like I'm listening to Huey Long, kind of, you know.

But he's saying, like, hey, we might need to call into National Guard. And we might, like, LSU is helping hype this thing up, too. Like, the LSU politicians are hyping this thing up. And Ole Miss is trying to play it up, like, they're not going to be Neanderthals. Like, they're hillbillies from Mississippi. They're going to be Neanderthals. Combine the fact that they're hillbillies from Mississippi that are going to be lubed the

fuck up. They are ready to go. They are primed. The pump is primed. So by the time 6.37 o'clock rolls around and these people who spent $6,700 on a ticket have been out in the grove getting plastered all fucking day, probably doing rails of blow off of porta-potty toilets. You think they're not going to go in there and fuck shit up?

The biggest question is, will there be a stoppage in the game because shit is thrown on the field? And at what point in the game, will the stoppage come in to play? At what point in this game will there be a stoppage because people are throwing shit? I don't know that it will happen pregame, but especially if LSU takes a big lead or something controversial happens. Like if there's a call overturn that benefits LSU or something. I give it a 0% chance that this game goes the entire way without a stoppage. And this is going to make for awesome TV. And the same way we said it about when Tennessee played Ole Miss in Tennessee,

and it was Lane's first trip back to Tennessee, kind of to go back to that. Lane coached there for big picture five minutes and they weren't really good when he coached there. Lane literally gave Ole Miss the greatest success they've had in modern times and then left in the middle of their greatest season ever.