Before getting to Lane Kiffin and yet another reason why he is right today, something completely unrelated….

(Besides 38 years ago today being the date of the 7-6 Auburn Earthquake Game)…

Ever since I was a kid watching LSU (or L.S.U.) beat previously undefeated Kentucky 36–10 in Lexington in 1984, I’ve loved that single K on the Wildcats’ helmets. I have no idea why that has stuck with me for so long. Once they moved away from it and stayed away from it, opting instead for various flavors of the “UK” logo, I kept wishing they would bring it back. It looked so much better, cleaner is more like it, than what they’ve been doing since.

To me the single “K” might even look better with those horrendous metallic uniforms they’ve worn.

Well, they’re bringing it back Saturday night against LSU, what they’re calling the “Power K,” which is sort of a gimmicky moniker but whatever. Kentucky released the news for these throwback Power K uniforms, which means at least one of my preferences for the evening has already been accommodated.

My weird attraction to the aesthetics of college football satisfied, let’s move to the man that will work to make the rest of the night coincide….

At Monday’s press conference, Kiffin said injuries had greatly tempered how strongly he felt about LSU’s ceiling in 2026. It was yet another example of the man’s refreshing honesty, where he actually goes beyond the nauseating coach-speak and provides media members substance they can use in their own work.

“And again, I hope you’re figuring out I’m not making excuses,” he said. “I just say how things are.”

I recognized everything about that line immediately, as I do much of what Kiffin says.

During my years teaching and coaching, I found myself doing something similar all the time. I would explain precisely what was happening and what was likely to happen in a game or in the coming tenor of Homecoming week, just as examples, and then almost in the same breath feel impelled to explain my intention in saying it.

Sometimes I was speaking to the players or students in front of me. Sometimes, in a sense, I was also speaking to anyone who wasn’t there—someone who might hear a portion of the conversation later and deem that I had meant something entirely different.

Usually of course, as is the case normally with Kiffin, something stereotypical and… wrong.

Kiffin was simply evaluating a team that is missing key pieces right now, including Whit Weeks and Trey’Dez Green, both No. 7s, whom he believes were performing at an All-American level. He remains encouraged by what LSU has managed to accomplish despite these injuries, and also optimistic about what the program can become. Those judgments can coexist in the cognitive world of nuance.

We sometimes make that coexistence unnecessarily difficult because we would rather exist in the simplistic world of the false binary. Something either is or isn’t.

Say the injuries, yes, are devastating, and somebody hears an excuse, even though those very same people would recognize the objective fact that those injuries would be devastating to any team. Say the team should overcome them— the “next man up!” nonsense—and people start assuming the backups should be as good as the All-American injured players, and if they’re not, it’s the crappy coach’s fault.

I don’t blame any coach if they are antagonistic to the media. Yet even here, I have watched Kiffin show restraint.

Admitting a difficulty here or ahead in such a way could sound like lowering an expectation or, as Kiffin put it, making an excuse. Pinpointing a weakness could sound like giving up on a student or player. Explaining why something would likely happen could sound like a self-fulfilling prophecy scenario.

So I would clarify at times. Right there in the moment. Just like Kiffin did. You could almost hear the wheels grinding and voices churning in that split second between him saying the truth and then qualifying it.

And that is probably why players and coaches typically don’t speak with such candor—just think about Arch Manning a few weeks ago—because while the media wants substance, they will so often take that substance and sh*t on the substance provider.

In my case, we still had work to do, on the court or in the classroom. I still expected us to perform. But in my mind I felt that we would be more likely to indeed perform well if we knew every obstacle we were about to face, yes the obvious, but also the not-so-obvious. And because most people don’t even foresee those not-so-obvious obstacles, it is strange to them that someone should make forecasts of such things.

The beautiful thing is that when those forecasts do come true, your players and students grow in their trust for you, and take a wild guess what happens to aforementioned performance…

That is what I hear in Kiffin’s comments, and that is one reason I’m picking LSU this weekend.

As the Tigers head north to Lexington, and hopefully don’t bring a hurricane with them, I am, for a change, thinking my heart and my head are simpatico. I want LSU to dominate, and I think they will, although admittedly I am concerned about the weather affecting their execution on the offensive side of the ball.

But the remnants of Isaias aside, I see in Lane Kiffin something the Paul Finebaums and Joel Klatts of the world continue to conveniently ignore: The man is serious. He is different than he used to be not that long ago, as is evidenced by his total disappearance from the troll game online. The man gives direct, honest answers to questions. And the man is in total control of that program.

And most importantly, as we would come to see in Saban’s program by early 2002 before that unfortunate injury to Matt Mauck during the Florida game in Gainesville that had them at 6-1 and rolling, that control, poise, and seriousness is penetrating the players. They are playing like their coach coaches, the way he speaks, the way he is leading right now.

“You deal with all of the crap that comes with Lane Kiffin and the attention that he gets… It’s a circus with Lane,” Klatt said.

Is that wholly accurate, Mr Klatt, especially now that we have so much to observe and evaluate of Kiffin’s attitude and approach since the Twitter trolling days, or are we finding out that part of the problem this whole time was maybe people like you and other members of the media creating the circus for your own clicks?

Nothing about Kiffin’s approach, if you actually watch the press conferences, says anything about a clown. The man is all business, and that is why, besides a litany of statistical advantages this space really doesn’t delve into, LSU can win on the road in the SEC—for the first time since October 2024. Really, all things told except the potential doom of any LSU road trip, this one shouldn’t even be that close.

And if it isn’t it will be more beautiful than any six-year-old’s nostalgia over a simple letter on a helmet.

Tigers 36, ‘Cats 10.

Thank you for reading The Hayride!