Will Lane Kiffin be "rewarded for failure", too?

1 December 2025

When we last left off, Jeff Landry was pissing and moaning about “rewarding failure” over having to pay ex-LSU head coach Brian Kelly after he was fired without cause. Kelly’s dismissal has cost LSU, and perhaps ultimately the state of Louisiana, some 54 million dollars as part of his contract buyout. As I wrote before, Kelly got what every worker dreams of: getting paid handsomely to sit on your ass. If Kelly is smart, he nor his children will ever have to work again. Ain’t that the American dream?

Landry, in typical reactionary fashion, originally wanted to stiff Kelly on his buyout. That didn’t fly after Kelly showed some back bone. I don’t know what Landry expected. As he once mocked Mick Jagger, “you can’t always get what you want.”

Defector’s Ray Ratto has predicted the future of this arrangement (emphasis mine):

There could not be a better or more volatile match of coach and program. Or did we forget that the governor of Louisiana, the supremely loopy Jeff Landry, helped fire the last guy, the finely toxic Brian Kelly, and also the athletic director who hired him, and then tried to wiggle out of Kelly’s $53 million buyout before backing down when Kelly lawyered up? Or that Landry soapboxed about the obscenity of coaching contracts more or less until the moment he signed off on Kiffin’s shorter deal (seven years) for more money ($90 million plus)? What are these “contradictions” of which you speak, stranger? Everything in college football is transactional, after all, and every long-term relationship is just a gussied-up version of a day-to-day one. It only takes a minute to eat a beignet, and half an hour to want another one; now imagine a sprawling, billion-dollar athletic conference run with that same thought process.

So yeah, LSU is absolutely the place for Lane Kiffin, and Landry is the ideal boss. The pairing pits two towering giants in the narcissism business against each other in a convergence that can only end with the word “pyrospectacular.” However and whenever it ends, it will culminate in an epically sky-illuminating assembly, in that oil-refinery-meets-discarded-lit-cigarette kind of way.

Kiffin is, at best, a job-hopper. When a better opportunity presents itself, he will likely leave the LSU program, if he isn’t in the short to medium term unsuccessful in re-building the LSU football team. Ratto suggests the Dallas Cowboys as a potential gig in the future, when that job opens up. That will all depend on how well he can turn the LSU football team around.

Kiffin will make around $12,000,000 annually from his arrangement with LSU, and indeed, there is a buyout clause, in case the Kiffin experiment is a failure. According to Amanda Christovich at Front Office Sports:

Lane Kiffin’s contract with LSU is patently different than Kelly’s—but seemingly not in the way Landry originally wanted. Kiffin’s buyout appears to be even larger. And unlike Kelly’s, it’s guaranteed.

Kiffin, who boarded a plane to Baton Rouge after a messy exit from Ole Miss on Sunday, has signed a seven-year, $91 million contract with LSU, according to The Advocate. Only Georgia’s Kirby Smart is known to make more with his 10-year, $130 million contract.

If LSU fires Kiffin without cause—the vast majority of firings, even for poor performance, are without cause—the school would owe Kiffin 80% of his remaining salary. The contract also does not include an offset or “duty to mitigate” clause. That means that Kiffin would not be obligated to find another job, nor would his salary from his new job offset whatever LSU would owe him.

In other words, the school has agreed to pay Kiffin 80% of his contract no matter what. If Kiffin were fired tomorrow, the school would owe him $72 million,with no recourse. If they were to fire him after next season with $78 million left on his contract, he would be owed $62 million. And so on.

And as if the hypocritical profligacy of our state’s “fiscal conservatives” just couldn’t get worse:

LSU has also reportedly agreed to pay Kiffin’s buyout for leaving Ole Miss, which is $3 million.

Kiffin will be under intense scrutiny, not only from LSU fans (who are at this point so used to winning that merely losing twice in one season is enough to make a coach anathema to the state), but also from the governor’s office, which has taken an absurd interest in meddling in the affairs of the state’s flagship university. The last three head coaches of the LSU Tigers were let go for poor performance: Les Miles in 2016, Ed Orgeron in 2021, and now Brian Kelly. LSU fans, and governor Landry is one, are spoiled rotten. We’ll see if Kiffin is the coach they want, or the one they deserve.