LSU football’s Lane Kiffin spent years as the most active coach on social media in college football.
He trolled rival coaches, poked at his former schools and turned his X account into a daily show. So when the first-year LSU head coach stood at SEC Media Days in Tampa on Thursday and said he doesn’t read anything about himself, at least one person at ESPN did not buy it.
Stephen A. Smith went after Kiffin on First Take later that morning during a segment with SEC Network’s Jordan Rodgers and Paul Finebaum, who were both in Tampa for the event.
Stephen A. Smith tells Lane Kiffin to stop lying on First Take
The trouble started when a reporter asked Kiffin if he gets a bad rap. “I don’t know if I do because I don’t read anything,” Kiffin said. Such a response surely evoked the “Why you always lying” meme from Smith.
Smith drew a hard line at feeling sorry for a man in Kiffin’s position. “Last time I checked, he’s a multi-millionaire, he’s living good, he’s got a dream job, he’s chilling at a university that he wanted to be at,” Smith said. “If he wasn’t going to succeed Nick Saban at the University of Alabama, this is the job that he wanted.”
“What I would implore Lane Kiffin to stop doing, stop lying, stop lying. Live in your truth and be cool with it,” Smith said. “I’ll be damned if you don’t have somebody monitoring what is on social media so you can pick and choose what you want to respond to.”
Smith even brought his mother into it. “It’s a lot easier and less stressful to force people to live with your truth than for you to have to live with your lies,” he said, repeating her advice. He added that Kiffin does not owe anyone an answer in the first place. “You can tell them no comment or you can tell them to kick rocks. It’s very cathartic.”
Smith then pointed to Kiffin’s old boss as the model, noting Saban never lied to the media and would instead let a reporter know “there are levels to which he is on and you are not.”
Not long ago, Smith defended Kiffin in May. When Kiffin’s Vanity Fair comments about recruiting to Ole Miss set off a firestorm, Smith said of the coach, “It wasn’t like he was lying.” Months later, the honesty question has flipped.
What Lane Kiffin said at SEC Media Days
Kiffin, who has not posted on X since the spring, told reporters in Tampa that his exit from social media started as a bet with his teenage son Knox. “If you tell me I can’t do something, that’s really the way to get me to do it,” Kiffin said. “So I just got off of everything, got off of (X), don’t even have the apps. So I don’t even read it either.”
The former Ole Miss coach also made news at the podium itself. His opening statement ran 2,807 words, the longest in SEC Media Days history, and left time for only four questions.
He later told ESPN he regrets how he handled his exit from Oxford, where he fought to coach the Rebels in the College Football Playoff after agreeing to take the LSU job. Asked if he had regrets, Kiffin said, “Yeah, I do.”
The 51-year-old now turns to a difficult opening stretch in Baton Rouge. Clemson visits LSU on Sept. 5 at 7:30 p.m. ET, and the Tigers travel to Ole Miss on Sept. 19 for Kiffin’s return to Vaught-Hemingway Stadium.
Whether he reads what people say about him that week or not, there will be plenty of headlines made about the game.
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