Lane Kiffin Apologizes For Ole Miss' Lack Of Diversity Claims

College football coach Lane Kiffin isn’t ignoring the storied and bloody history of the South; in fact, many Black grandmothers wouldn’t let him forget it even if he tried. 

In an interview with Vanity Fair for a piece on Kiffin published Monday, May 11, the first-year head coach of LSU, who was previously the head coach at Ole Miss for the last six years, noted that the school’s location, history of racism, and deep ties to Confederate symbols made it harder to land top recruits. 

Kiffin told the publication that top recruits would tell him, “Hey, coach, we really like you. But my grandparents aren’t letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi.”

“That doesn’t come up when you say Baton Rouge, Louisiana,” Kiffin said. “Parents were sitting here this weekend saying the campus’s diversity feels so great: ‘It feels like there’s no segregation. And we want that for our kid because that’s the real world.’”

During a conversation with the magazine the next day, Kiffin told Vanity Fair that he hoped his comment “comes across respectful to Ole Miss…. There are some things that I’m saying that are factual, they’re not shots.”

Kiffin told On3 on Tuesday that he’s apologized for his comments and meant no disrespect to anyone at Mississippi.

“I really apologize if anybody at Ole Miss or in Mississippi was offended by that,” Kiffin told On3. “In a four-hour interview [with Vanity Fair], I was asked a lot of questions on a lot of things, and Ole Miss has been wonderful to me and to my family. 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.”

Kiffin was Ole Miss’s coach from 2020-25, which included a College Football Playoff appearance last season. Kiffin abandoned Ole Miss right before the playoff to accept the job at LSU, which gave him a seven-year, $91 million deal, USA Today reports. 

Pete Golding, the new head coach at Ole Miss took the team to the playoff semifinals, where it lost to Miami 31-27.

It was pretty commonplace for Confederate flags to be displayed during Rebels home games up until the late 1990s, when the university instituted a ban on sticks at sporting events in 1997. They even got rid of their mascot and gun carrying southerner named Colonel Rob in 2003. He was replaced “in 2010 by a black bear (which was later replaced by a shark in 2018). Even the university’s unofficial name, Ole Miss, has roots extending back to the days of slavery,” IS Today reports. 

Vanity Fair reports that about 26% of Oxford residents are Black, compared to 51% of Baton Rouge residents.

See social media’s reaction to Kiffin bringing up race as a factor in recruitment below.