It’s probably fair to say that year one for Lane Kiffin at LSU isn’t going quite how most people envisioned it when he was hired.
The Tigers gave Kiffin a $93 million contract and one of the most expensive rosters in college football, and six games into his first campaign on the bayou, the Lane Train is 4-2 and staring down the barrel of missing the College Football Playoff if his team comes away with another loss during a brutal back half of the schedule.
Even in today’s day and age of instant roster upgrades, though, I tend to give most coaches a pass in their first year at a new school (within reason).
WHAT DOES A REALISTICALLY SUCCESSFUL FIRST YEAR LOOK LIKE FOR HEAD COACH LANE KIFFIN AT LSU?
Weird highs and lows can occur and players still need time to adapt to the culture and expectations set by the new staff, so going solely off of results on the field can leave fans ready to hit the eject button before enough data has been compiled.
For that reason, I like to pay attention to what’s happening off the field as much as on it, and there is a key thread throughout Kiffin’s recruiting strategy that could be a tell for whether or not he will succeed in Baton Rouge.
If we take a look at LSU’s 2027 recruiting class as it stands right now, nothing looks too alarming.
The Tigers sit at 11th in the 247Sports composite rankings, which is really good albeit not elite, but with only 16 commits, it still has plenty of room to grow.
The ranking isn’t necessarily the problem. The sticking point here is entirely geographical.
Just to offer up a bit of a background note on Louisiana high school football before we continue, it has long been said that The Boot is one of the most talent rich states per capita in the entire country.
Every successful LSU coach in the 21st century, from Nick Saban to Les Miles to Ed Orgeron, has made locking down the Tigers’ home state a priority, and the results speak for themselves.
Kiffin is letting the talent from Louisiana seep through his hands, and it’s not an overreaction to say that could spell doom for him.
Of the top ten prospects in the 2027 recruiting class from Louisiana according to 247Sports, LSU has four of them.
Not bad, until you realize that, of the four prospects who carry a five-star rating only one of them is currently committed to the Tigers.
The latest casualty came in the form of Easton Royal, a five-star, all-world wide receiver from literally right down the road at Brother Martin High School in New Orleans.
Royal was committed to Texas for nearly a year, but everyone with any inside knowledge believed a flip to the instate Tigers was inevitable.
The flip came this past Sunday, but instead of staying in The Boot, Royal opted to head to The Swamp instead to play for the Gators.
What’s even worse is that the lone composite five-star on from that list who is committed to LSU, Ahmad Hudson, has been getting courted heavily by Nebraska for several weeks now, and a flip to the Huskers seems imminent.
Losing instate five-stars to Florida (Royal), Alabama (quarterback Elijah Haven), and Notre Dame (o-lineman Albert Simien) is painful but excusable.
Nebraska taking a five-star from the clutches of the Tigers is a different can of worms altogether.
It’s not 1996 anymore, and the Huskers are a shell of the once-dominant program they used to be.
Over the summer, I wrote about how Kiffin adding former Tigers head coach Ed Orgeron to the staff was his way of addressing the shortcomings of his predecessor, Brian Kelly, but so far, that doesn’t seem to be helping.
Kelly famously failed to recruit the state of Louisiana to the likings of Tiger fans everywhere, and it ultimately sank his efforts and landed him on the unemployment line this past year.
It’s early, but Kiffin’s classes are looking eerily similar to Kelly’s first full class in Baton Rouge, when six of the top ten composite prospects in Louisiana left the friendly confines of The Boot.
Although Kelly’s 2024 class remedied this quite a bit (signing nine of the top ten composite prospects in the state), it was the only year in which Kelly landed a majority of the top homegrown talent.
By that point, the damage had been done.
Coaches like Orgeron in the past have eschewed recruiting the state when it made sense, such as during cycles when Louisiana lacked some of the top-end talent it normally possesses.
But 2027 is a historically loaded cycle for the state, and Kiffin is failing to tap into the goldmine in his own backyard.
Detractors of this theory will say things like “high school recruiting doesn’t matter anymore” and “they can just use the portal,” but will fail to mention that Kiffin leaned heavily on the portal this year to make up the bulk of his roster.
Relying on the portal is volatile, and although most recruits are always a flight risk even after they sign at a school, kids from Louisiana have usually been fiercely loyal to their home state.
Just look at the discourse surrounding LSU and Kiffin’s recruiting efforts from Tiger fans and beat writers following the news of Royal’s flip to Florida and Hudson’s open flirtation with Nebraska.
Recruiting and retaining the best players from The Boot matters to these people, and if Kiffin fails to show progress on the field, his leash could get that much tighter based solely on the fact that he isn’t doing this the “LSU way.”
I’ve gone on record saying that Lane Kiffin will be wildly successful at LSU, and I still believe that.
He’s too talented a coach with too many resources behind him to fail.
But if this trend continues, I could very well be wrong.
College football is weird like that, and Kiffin needs to right the ship and lock down The Boot, or he could face the same fate as the last guy to strike out on the bayou.