Scooter Hobbs column: Kiffin sold on LSU

Published 10:20 am Friday, February 6, 2026

At the time, he was our future brother-in-law, a wonderful fellow who is a still a valued member of the family. But Steve picked the wrong Christmas to make the engagement official.

We still laugh about it.

My late mother, you must understand, really was a good cook and prided herself on it to the point that she wasn’t above fishing for compliments at the dinner table.

But one year somebody had the lamebrained idea to get her a crock pot as a Christmas gift.

Dear old mom was unfamiliar with it, but excited to give a whirl.

So, a couple of days after Christmas, she whipped up a Sunday dinner that was … well, it was new and untested, wholly experimental and untried, also unknown and, for lack of a better description …

Basically, it was “inedible” is what it was. Awful. Rank.

No real harm done. Fast food joints were nearby and open. Except for poor Steve who, still being in the suck-up-to-the-in-laws stage of his introduction to the family, not only had to somehow get it down, he had to gush to our mom and rave about whatever foul fowl came out of that crock pot as if he was being treated to fine dining at a Paris bistro.

Anyway, I had to wonder Wednesday if that wasn’t somewhat the same situation that Lane Kiffin was in during what was really his first formal tussle with the state’s sports media — relayed, of course, to the state’s populace.

He was gushing up, full-blown telling the state what it wanted to hear.

Anyway, at times I was wondering if that was really LSU that he was talking about.

For if the LSU program and culture was the perfect football utopia he kept describing, if Baton Rouge was the center of the pigskin universe as he suggested, he wouldn’t have been up at that podium. The Tigers wouldn’t have needed a new coach.

Last year, in particular, the program seemed to have gotten crossways with a crock pot.

Yet to hear Kiffin tell it … well, let’s listen in.

“I didn’t take the job because I knew a lot about the town,” he said. “I didn’t know much about it at all. I took the job because of the football program.”

And now?

He knows LSU football, mainly its potential. Two months on the job, after being in the middle of it, he says he can “feel it” and is motivated by it.

Bottom line: “These people are so excited, now let’s put this product together and think about the excitement when we have all this and we’re winning on top of it.”

That would be the plan. That’s pretty much the return on the $13 million annual investment that LSU is counting on with Kiffin’s salary.

It almost sounds like plug-and-play to get LSU back on the streak where the three coaches before Brian Kelly all won national championships.

But Kiffin did acknowledge there might have been some flaws in the program when he arrived.

It apparently bothered LSU fans more than it did him that one of the reasons the Tigers brought in 43 portal players was that they also lost 34 going the other direction.

“My answer to the fans is, ‘(Should) we keep the same players?’ We’re good coaches, but we also don’t have magic dust. We changed a lot because there needs to be a lot of change within the building.”

Getting the No. 1 transfer class, including three of the top five-rated overall prospects was a start — No. 1 in quarterback Sam Leavitt, No. 3 in offensive lineman Jordan Seaton and No. 5 in edge rusher Princewill Umanmielen.

Kiffin is renowned as the “Portal King,” a tag he picked up while at Ole Miss — or, as it will apparently be henceforth known in Kiffin’s presence: “That last place” or “My previous job.”

But, again preaching to his new choir, he downplayed his own role in the portal haul.

“Luckily we were recruiting to LSU and all the great things that make it,” he said.

It’s partly financial, he admitted, the school’s cash commitment to the football chores.

Cash on the barrelhead. You don’t get far without it these days, but it’s not quite as romantic as the tale Kiffin told.

“The whole town was amazing in recruiting to bring these kids in,” he said. “The hospitality showed at the hotels, restaurants, on campus, was unbelievable.

“They walk into Tiger Stadium, and it’s LSU … and they see the magnitude of the place.

“They come to visit they say the same thing … it’s just different. It’s a different feeling. That’s not the financial piece, that’s just LSU.”

That’s also music to the ears of Kiffin’s new fan base.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics for the American Press. Contact him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com