By now, most of you are painfully aware of the game taking place in Oxford, Mississippi, this weekend between LSU and Ole Miss.
It’s less of a game and more a national event, given the added stakes of Tigers head coach Lane Kiffin making his return to Vaught Hemingway Stadium for the first time since leaving the Rebels in the lurch to make his way to Baton Rouge.
There will be plenty of bad blood to go around for all parties involved, but this kind of “reunion” isn’t entirely unprecedented.
Prominent head coaches will, occasionally, leave their teams on less than ideal terms, and when they make the return trip to the place they used to call home, it can get a little toxic.
With that in mind, I decided to take a look at a few other times head coaches made their way back to the schools that used to employ them and how those trips compared to Kiffin’s welcome committee in Oxford.
Some of these went a little more amicably than others, but all were fairly noteworthy, so let’s dive in.
Before he became the unquestioned GOAT in the annals of college football, Nick Saban was a wildly successful coach at LSU in the early to mid-2000s.
After a pair of SEC Championships and a national title during his five-year tenure with the Tigers, Saban departed for the NFL, leaving many folks on the bayou feeling embittered and betrayed.
Following an unremarkable pair of seasons with the Miami Dolphins, Saban decided it was time to return to the college ranks, opting to don the headset at LSU’s biggest rival, Alabama, in 2007.
Tiger fans would only have to wait one year before their former head coach made his way back to Death Valley, as the top-ranked Crimson Tide made their way to Baton Rouge to play 15th-ranked LSU.
The atmosphere around the game was tense and filled with anger and resentment toward Saban, and it didn’t help that the Tide escaped with a 27-21 overtime win to effectively knock the Bayou Bengals out of the SEC Championship hunt.
Saban was given a police escort out of the stadium, and years later, the six-time national champion would call leaving LSU the biggest mistake of his career.
Throughout the entirety of the 90s and into the early 2000s, Steve Spurrier and Florida football were synonymous with one another.
The Head Ball Coach won a Heisman Trophy in 1966 while quarterbacking the Gators, and when he returned to roam the sidelines in 1990, he fulfilled the prophecy of “awakening the sleeping giant” once uttered by Alabama legend Paul “Bear” Bryant.
Six SEC Championships and one national title later, and Spurrier figured he had accomplished all he needed to, leaving the friendly confines of The Swamp – the name he gave to Ben Hill Griffin Stadium – for an NFL coaching gig with the Washington Redskins in 2002.
Much like Nick Saban, Spurrier wasn’t long for the pros, returning to the SEC in 2005 as the head coach of the South Carolina Gamecocks.
This didn’t sit well with a majority of Gator fans, seeing their visor-clad Messiah coaching an SEC East rival, and it made it even worse that he beat his old school in his first year on the job.
When Spurrier and the Gamecocks made their first trip to The Swamp together in 2006, a game with national championship implications for the home team had new stakes attached to it.
While the fans weren’t openly hostile towards their former coach (most were even downright warm), it felt almost like watching a weird alternate reality simulation for those in attendance.
The game was an instant classic, with Gators defensive end Jarvis Moss blocking a potential game-winning field goal to preserve the 17-16 win for Florida, and keep their BCS title game hopes alive in the process.
Spurrier once said “only Gators get out alive” when referring to The Swamp, and that very phrase came back to bite him on that day in November 2006.
Hey, look! A familiar face!
Yes, Lane Kiffin is no stranger to making his way back to old stomping grounds, as he had to do something similar just a few years ago.
When Tennessee hired Kiffin in 2009, the then-33-year-old was fresh off of a failed stint as the Oakland Raiders’ head coach, and was looking to make a splash in the SEC.
A “splash” is putting it mildly, as Kiffin immediately went into prison survival mode and tried to pick a fight with the biggest guy in the pen, that being Florida and head coach Urban Meyer.
Kiffin ruffled feathers, accusing Meyer of recruiting violations and promising to “sing Rocky Top all night long” after beating the Gators in The Swamp, but after a year of empty promises and a 7-6 campaign, the brash offensive genius left for sunny Southern California to coach the USC Trojans.
Vols fans revolted, burning couches and rioting on campus, while Kiffin left under cover of darkness.
Flash forward to 2021, and Tennessee fans finally got their chance to let their old head coach know how they really felt in person, as the Rebels made their way to Neyland Stadium.
Kiffin had bounced around as an offensive coordinator and head coach at a few different stops before settling into Oxford to coach the Ole Miss football team, and a night game in Knoxville presented an opportunity for some madness.
The game was crazy enough on its own, as the two teams combined for nearly 1,000 yards of total offense and the Vols even had the ball trailing by only five with only a minute left in the fourth quarter.
A controversial review then led to a nearly 20 minute delay, as Volunteer fans chucked mustard bottles and golf balls onto the field, the latter of which allegedly hit Kiffin.
As he was being interviewed on the field following the win, Kiffin did his best George Costanza impression, presenting the very golf ball that struck him to a shocked ESPN audience watching at home.
The fact that this game took place nearly a dozen years after his departure did nothing to snuff out the anger Vols fans held toward their former head coach.
Here’s one that a lot of people may have forgotten about, but it deserves mention all the same.
The first three instances on this list are comprised of coaches who decided to stay in conference and take jobs with rival SEC programs, but what happens when a coach who made an unceremonious exit just happens to be on the schedule by way of a cupcake matchup scheduled years before he even agreed to take the job?
For those who need a history lesson, Bobby Petrino coached the Arkansas Razorbacks in the late 2000s and early 2010s, even leading the team to a Sugar Bowl berth in 2010 and a top-five finish in 2011.
He was incredibly successful in the short time he called Fayetteville home until 2012, when he crashed his motorcycle with a former Arkansas volleyball player riding on the back.
This led to an investigation and, eventually, his termination from the university, ending a promising rise for the Razorbacks under Petrino.
A decade later, Petrino found his way back to Frank Broyles Field by way of coaching the Missouri State Bears, a lower-end FCS school.
Arkansas, conversely, was ranked in the top 10 and looked to improve upon their nine-win season in 2021 with third-year head coach Sam Pittman.
It appeared as though the Hogs were going to exact some revenge on their motorcycle-obsessed outcast, but, in a game that may have been a precursor to how the rest of the Pittman era would go, the Razorbacks needed to score 21 unanswered points in the fourth quarter to eke out a 38-27 victory.
Petrino would actually go on to be the offensive coordinator for Pittman just one year later, and would even be the interim head coach in 2025 when Pittman was given the axe.
They truly can’t quit the one that got away in Fayetteville.
