Lane Kiffin Apologizes For Comments On Race And Recruiting

LSU head football coach Lane Kiffin apologized on Tuesday to anyone offended by recent comments he made about recruiting challenges for black players when he was at Ole Miss.

In an interview with On3 Sports, Kiffin addressed backlash to his remarks published in a Vanity Fair profile, in which he discussed obstacles he faced while recruiting some out-of-state black prospects to Mississippi.

“In a four-hour interview, I was asked a lot of questions on a lot of things, and Ole Miss has been wonderful to me and to my family,” Kiffin said. “I was asked questions about the differences in recruiting, and I said a narrative that we battled there from some out-of-state black parents and grandparents was not wanting their kid to move to Mississippi. That’s a narrative that coaches have been fighting forever. It wasn’t calculated by bringing it up.”

In the Vanity Fair piece, Kiffin said some recruits told him family members were hesitant to allow them to move to Oxford, Mississippi, citing the state’s history and perceptions about race.

“That doesn’t come up when you say Baton Rouge, Louisiana,” Kiffin said, contrasting his current program at LSU.

The author of the piece, Chris Smith, claimed that Kiffin was willing to “indirectly invoke Ole Miss’s struggle to distance itself from symbols like the Confederate flag, Colonel Rebel, and the nickname ‘Ole Miss’ itself.”

The comments drew criticism from some Ole Miss supporters and added to lingering tensions after Kiffin ditched the program during last season’s College Football Playoff run.

ESPN senior writer Ryan McGee described Kiffin’s comments as “on schedule,” fitting a familiar pattern of the “Lane Kiffin playbook.” He told “The Dan Patrick Show” that Kiffin should be cautious when discussing topics like race and regional history, citing Ole Miss’s past controversies and LSU’s ties to the Confederacy.

McGee went on to say he thinks Kiffin simply wants the fans to “love him where he is and he doesn’t really care if they still love him where he was.”

Smith, who penned the Vanity Fair article, said on “The Paul Finebaum Show” that he was fascinated that Kiffin was “willing to go there,” adding that using demographics as a factor in recruiting could become part of Kiffin’s strategy at LSU.

Kiffin is set to return to Oxford on September 19, when LSU faces Ole Miss in his first game back since bailing on the program.