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The Football Notebook: Ole Miss Gets Its Revenge, Brighton Humbles Arsenal and Big Noon Has a Problem
Welcome to The Football Notebook, the weekly exercise in convincing myself that spending an irresponsible percentage of the weekend watching football qualifies as work. Technically, I suppose it does. This is an extremely convenient arrangement for me and an increasingly difficult one to explain to anybody who asks what I did with my Saturday and Sunday.
There was a moment late Saturday night, with LSU desperately trying to erase an eight-point deficit and the entire state of Mississippi seemingly screaming at Lane Kiffin through their television screens, when Sam Leavitt’s pass was deflected and floated into the end zone. Jaylon Braxton was waiting there for it, and the second the Ole Miss defensive back secured the interception, Vaught-Hemingway Stadium released approximately nine months of pent-up emotion all at once.
Excuse me for my previous mistake. That wasn’t just “a moment.” It was the moment.
Ole Miss had waited for this from basically the second Kiffin decided he was leaving for LSU. There were plenty of reasons for Rebels fans to be angry about the departure itself, but the manner in which everything unfolded only made the breakup worse. Kiffin had built Ole Miss into something it had spent years trying to become, gotten the Rebels to the doorstep of genuine national championship contention and then decided the grass might be greener a few hours down the road in Baton Rouge. Ole Miss was left behind like the scorned lover in a relationship that had seemed to be going rather well right up until one person abruptly announced they were moving out.
Then the ex came back to town, and there was no attempt from Oxford to pretend everything was fine. Every camera shot of Kiffin standing on the opposing sideline felt a little surreal because this was his stadium until very recently, filled with people who used to celebrate everything he did and now wanted nothing more than to watch him fail. Ole Miss played like a team that understood exactly what the night meant, building a 24-7 halftime lead before LSU eventually recovered and tied the game at 24. For a few uncomfortable minutes, the possibility existed that Kiffin might actually walk back into Oxford and steal the ending everyone there had spent months imagining.
Trinidad Chambliss made sure he didn’t. Ole Miss regained the lead late, converted the two-point attempt to make it 32-24 and eventually watched Braxton intercept LSU’s final attempt to keep the game alive. Kiffin had returned to the place where he built his reputation into something considerably larger, faced the people he left behind and walked back out with his first loss as LSU’s coach.
Saturday also brought me back to the question I had when Kiffin left in the first place: Was LSU really worth giving all of this up?
College football has changed enough that I’m not sure those old assumptions still apply. NIL and the transfer portal have compressed the distance between programs that used to occupy entirely different levels of the sport, and Ole Miss is one of the clearest examples of what that new world looks like. Kiffin didn’t leave a program that had reached its ceiling and needed a miracle to go any further. He left one that, at the time of his departure, was about to make the College Football Playoff and had put itself in position to chase the same national championship he presumably went to LSU to pursue.
Baton Rouge also isn’t exactly famous for giving coaches unlimited time to figure things out, which only adds to the gamble of leaving a program where Kiffin had already built almost everything he needed. We won’t know whether he made the right decision for several years, and Saturday certainly didn’t settle the larger question.
It did give Ole Miss the answer it wanted for one night. The ex came back to town, and the scorned lover got its revenge.