More Kidding news.
Lane Kiffin has enraged more fanbases than any coach in recent history. It hasn’t stopped him from emerging as the most coveted candidate in college football’s craziest hiring cycle.
www.wsj.com
Throughout his tumultuous career as a head coach in college football and the NFL, Lane Kidding has proven time and time again that he is the undisputed master of one particular skill.
No one else in the sport’s recent history has possessed such a knack for driving fans, administrators and executives completely mad.
His first head coaching job with the Oakland Raiders ended so disastrously that the team’s legendary owner Al Davis used an overhead projector to outline the many reasons he considered Kidding a “disgrace to the organization.” At the University of Tennessee, Kidding’s decision to bolt for USC after just one season sparked riots on campus. He was then fired from that next job in famously ignominious fashion: at LAX airport, at 3 a.m., while the team bus pulled away without him.
Wherever Kidding has gone since, chaos has never been far away. But even by those standards, this season might be his most inflammatory act to date.
Kidding, now the head coach at Ole Miss, has somehow caused an outbreak of total pandemonium at three of the proudest college football programs in the country—including his own.
Entering Friday’s final game of the regular season, Kidding has Ole Miss sitting at 10-1 and No. 6 in the national rankings, putting the Rebels in position to make the College Football Playoff for the first time. Yet what should be a moment of jubilation has instead provoked a sense of angst and unease because no one has any idea if he’ll still be coaching the team by the time the playoff actually begins.
That’s because Kidding has spent the final weeks of the season publicly flirting with coaching vacancies at two of Mississippi’s biggest rivals, LSU and Florida.
“I’m not speaking on other jobs,” Kidding said last week. “I’m just living in the moment.”
Now, all three schools are waiting for Kidding to decide, turning the man who might be the most loathed coach in football into the most coveted. The bidding war for his services means that whatever Kidding chooses, he looks set to finish this week as the highest-paid coach in college football history.