We are past the point of trying to actively recreate the coaching search Florida had last year. The Man in the Black Polo was fired on October 19, and instantly the search for Gator fans narrowed in on Lane Kiffin. As it played out, Kiffin wound up choosing to take his talents to LSU, and Florida landed Jon Sumrall from Tulane.
What has been up for debate is just how close Florida was to actually landing Kiffin. An excerpt from a new book seems to hint that the Gators were indeed the early frontrunners to land Kiffin before he changed course to LSU.
Lane Kiffin had Gainesville on his mind after win over Oklahoma
CBS Sports posted an excerpt from the new book Lane Being Lane: The Story of Lane Kiffin, College Football's Agent of Chaos, by John Talty. The excerpt highlights the win over Oklahoma on the road last year that essentially gave Ole Miss a clear path to the playoffs.
The piece paints a picture that after the win, Kiffin’s first thoughts were about Gainesville and not Oxford:
Instead of basking in perhaps his most important win as Ole Miss's head coach, Kiffin turned to defensive coordinator Pete Golding on the field and asked him, "Are you ready to go to Gainesville?"
Taking the quote at face value, and for the sake of argument, we'll assume it was real, it aligns with the reporting at the time. That game was one week after Florida’s job came open and was one day prior to Brian Kelly getting fired at LSU. The story, as it has essentially been told, is that Florida had the initial inside track for Kiffin, and then LSU entered the picture and won out.
What we would be more interested in finding out, and we would need to read the full book to see if it touches on this topic accurately, is why exactly there was a disconnect by November between what people inside Florida’s facilities were claiming versus what everyone from outside of Gainesville was reporting.
By mid-November, essentially every national source and even people from the Ole Miss side were reporting that the Lane Kiffin Sweepstakes was between LSU and Ole Miss. Yet, the word that kept coming out of Gainesville all the way until Black Friday was that Florida still had a real shot.
For what it is worth, and as we have written over the past couple of months, Florida got a far better cultural fit with Jon Sumrall than with Kiffin. That’s not to say that Kiffin isn’t going to win a bunch of games with LSU, but one of the reasons why Florida was in the mix is because of this belief that Kiffin craves the spotlight.
Yet, time and time again since taking the job at LSU, Kiffin has seemed uncomfortable when the spotlight has actually found him. Until things play out, though, we won’t know whether Florida actually came out for the better.
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