Lane Kiffin owes Ole Miss big time for building a No. 1 transfer portal class on the remains of the mess he left in Oxford.
With the transfer portal chaos finally winding down, Kiffin's first transfer portal class at LSU made history by closing at No.1. And Ole Miss should be on the lookout for a massive thanks from Kiffin for it.
He built it from what everything he gutted the Rebels of.
He was already taking half of Ole Miss's staff with him when he left Oxford. If that was not enough, he raided Golding's staff even more to suck out whatever he could while the Rebels were in their College Football Playoff run, and eventually added more to his staff in purple gear.
A semifinal-appearance OC Charlie Weis Jr. and the staff were perhaps Kiffin's biggest selling points to the transfers, knowing they would have Kiffin's offensive mastermind backed by Weis's brilliant plays.
And that is just talking about the staff. The LSU head coach knew exactly which player to approach from the Rebels locker room to poach. Winston Watkins and Devin Harper were some early wins that Kiffin scored from Ole Miss.
However, he was planning on something much bigger.
Lane Kiffin's No. 1 portal class plan doesn't end there
Meanwhile, in Oxford, Pete Golding was also going strong in the transfer portal, making a roster that could easily turn any program green with envy, mainly because he had most of his established players returning.
That soon changed as the term sheets were leaked in the Rebels' locker room just two days before the transfer portal window was about to close.
Top Rebels players were hitting the exit ramps right at the closing time, leaving Golding with very slim room to even form a strategy to replace them.
The reported blame of releasing the terms sheets went to, of course, Kiffin.
Whether he did it or not is still a mystery, but what he did get out of it was some of his biggest transfer portal wins: LB TJ Dottery and Edge Princewill Umanmielen.
Dottery was Golding's defensive cornerstone, and what you call a green dot linebacker. Umanmielen led the team with his 9.0 sacks, and was also the No. 1 edge in this transfer portal cycle.
The rest of Kiffin's transfer portal wins definitely include several No. 1 players, but it would be hard to deny that the class has been made on the remains of everything he gutted out of Ole Miss.