LSU welcomes a Top 25 Texas A&M team to Baton Rouge on Saturday in what is being viewed as a make-or-break game between the two one-loss teams, but Tigers head coach Lane Kiffin can’t seem to stop talking about his team’s loss at Ole Miss.
During Wednesday’s SEC coaches’ teleconference call, Kiffin spoke about the challenges of his team taking on another dual-threat quarterback this week in Texas A&M’s Marcel Reed after struggling to slow down Ole Miss star Trinidad Chambliss.
Or at least that’s what his comments were initially focused on before complaining about his team’s schedule.
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“Obviously we just played the best one in the country last week thinking he can hurt you even when you have the right call on and everybody covered and a guy comes free,” Kiffin explained. “Obviously he (Chambliss) played great a year ago here in the stadium, so this is one of those scheduling quirks just like last week where never in that LSU-Ole Miss series had it ever been played two times in a row.”
While it is both odd and rare that Ole Miss got the benefit of playing LSU – a historic rival – in Oxford back-to-back seasons, Kiffin’s claim that the series had never been played at the same venue in consecutive seasons is false.
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LSU played host to the game in 2001 and 2002, and if you go back to the 1960s, Baton Rouge hosted the contest for four straight seasons from 1961 to 1964. This season and the last marked the first time in the 112-game series that the rivalry game took place in Oxford in back-to-back years. Kiffin led Ole Miss to a win over LSU in 2025 before leaving for the Tigers’ head coaching gig in November.
It just so happens that Kiffin’s complaint comes the same week his new LSU team gets the benefit of hosting Texas A&M for the second straight season instead of going on the road and playing in front of 100,000-plus fans in College Station.
Kiffin recognized that the schedule quirks are a part of the new nine-game conference schedule the SEC has implemented this season, but he alluded to it in a sarcastic manner.
“That (Ole Miss) game was supposed to be here, and this one was supposed to be (at Texas A&M),” Kiffin said. ” So these are the scheduling quirks that come with our awesome move to nine games that has sure looked so great here lately.”
Kiffin making a tongue-in-cheek comment about the nine-game SEC schedule just one conference game into the 2026 campaign – his first in Baton Rouge – is certainly bold.
