LSU coach Lane Kiffin is currently in the two-year-long process of reconciling with his ex-wife, Layla Kiffin, with reports putting their reconnection at some point in late 2024. It became official in January of last year, when an Instagram post showed them together. They have since moved back together, and everything seems swimmingly for the family now, based in Baton Rouge.
However, this was a long process, as a new interview with Vanity Fair now attests. At the center of it is the years-long reckoning process with his drinking problem, the coach has gone through:
“My whole drive when I was younger was like, How fast can I get everything? How fast can I get the big job? The big contract?” Kiffin, 51, said. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve tried to work on that, making decisions that are more delayed gratification…I got tired of digging out of hangovers, tired of digging out of situations or things I said.”
This is a departure from the official story the then Alabama offensive coordinator told the press in 2016 when he got divorced from Layla, with him saying at the time that the separation was a mutual decision and that they remained committed to parenting their three kids.
According to Vanity Fair, Lane Kiffin’s initial years as a high-end coach went hard on him, and he developed a habit of pounding beers and drinking vodka, which took a heavy toll on his marriage. In 2021, he stopped drinking and adopted hot yoga and pickleball as a way to deal with stress.
In a 2024 interview with ESPN, he shared the following excerpt from his Alcoholics Anonymous journal:
“Ego was being replaced with self-respect, resentment and hatred were being replaced with tolerance and understanding.”
Lane Kiffin’s move to LSU: More than money?
For a while, it’s been understood that Lane Kiffin’s decision to move from Ole Miss to LSU was primarily motivated by financial aspects. In his latest interview with Vanity Fair, Kiffin seems to make it look like it was about taking a stance against racism:
“‘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. 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.’”
Ole Miss is known to be one of the most socially conservative educational institutions, with the school using Confederate-related iconography repeatedly. It also has a contentious history of riots and racist incidents during the Civil Rights era, including connections to the Ku Klux Klan.
However, it could seem like the allegation by Kiffin is coming out of left field, after his reputation took a hit for leaving the Rebels in the wake of their first College Football Playoff participation.
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