Lane Kiffin's repuation will always precede him in college football the way he burnt his bridges with Ole Miss.
So, when someone leaked term sheets and NIL documents in the Ole Miss locker room to orchestrate a mass exodus of expeirienced star players who were returning to Ole Miss in 2026 until that information, naturally Kiffin was the one who got all the blame.
The Ole Miss fans, and mostly everyone else from college football, didn't take another second to presume who did it.
He sabotaged the program once; he would absolutely do it again.
If anything, Kiffin knows some dirty tricks that he would undoubtedly use to snatch his crown of the top transfer portal class from Curt Cignetti this cycle. The leaked documents hurt Ole Miss much worse than anticipated, as star players like TJ Dottery, Cayden Lee, and Princewill Umanmielen transferred out in the final days of transfer portal.
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Yet, Kiffin doesn't look like he is winning significantly from it all still.
So far, Kiffin has managed to lure just two Ole Miss players to Baton Rogue.
One of them, Winston Walkins had already commited to LSU before the whole fiasco went down in the Grove.
The only player that Kiffin scored out of the chaos he reportedly orchestrated is star LB TJ Dottery. It might be one of his biggest transfer portal wins this season as far as it goes.
But that's it.
If Kiffin has gone through the trouble of leaking those reports per the rumors, he will most surely be on a wild chase of the Ole Miss players who are yet to commit their next school.
Players like Lee and Umanmielen will be his most obvious targets.
We'll see how many more efforts, or dirty tricks, he might need to pull before he gets to a point where he could say he successfully poached all good players from the Rebels.