Lane Kiffin’s bitter divorce with Ole Miss reopened old wounds. He returns this weekend as Public Enemy No. 1

By Dana O’Neil, CNN

Oxford, Mississippi (CNN) — The Library Sports Bar is everything a college bar should be. Old, battered stools stand alongside a weathered wood bar. Stickers celebrating bygone 21st birthdays cover the walls outside the bathrooms. The barroom gives way to the Boom Boom room (for bands), which leads to the patio, all designed for mobs of undergrads who want cheap drinks and a place to hang.

In 1997, John Desler, a former Ole Miss defensive back, and his wife, Leelee, bought the guts of the place from James Purvis, proprietor of Purvis Pool Hall and the town’s most renowned bookie. The Deslers slowly expanded The Library, eventually stretching its reach down nearly the entire block.

It was Leelee who decided to hang the flags out front, one for each of the Rebels’ football opponents. Every time Ole Miss won, she decided, she’d replace the opposing colors with a red flag that read, “Rebels Take the Win.”

Last season, all but one of the opponents’ banners disappeared. Eventually, 13 “Rebels Take the Win” flags fluttered down Van Buren Avenue, a visual affirmation of the best season here since Archie Manning was the biggest man on campus.

On this, the last Sunday afternoon before football returns to Oxford, the 2026 season flags stand at the ready as Elizabeth Heiskell ducks into The Library.

“I cannot wait to take that LSU flag down,” she says to everyone and no one in particular. “I mean, we’re all over it, but we want that win.”

Heiskell was born and raised in the Delta, the northwest section of the state often called the most Southern place on Earth. She attended Mississippi State, but wound up living in Oxford when her husband, Luke, had the harebrained idea to start a vegetable farm outside of town. Heiskell went from delivering vegetables to restaurants in a beat-up, old prison van with no air conditioning to the preeminent caterer in town, author of three cookbooks and a regular contributor to the “Today” show.

Her time in Oxford also shifted her loyalties. She is now as fierce an Ole Miss fan as you’ll find. She has a regular spot reserved in the Grove and closes texts with “Hotty Toddy.” Both a Southern charmer and a Southern spitfire, she peppers her yarns with smirks and eye rolls and is unabashed about both possessing and sharing her strong opinions.

A year ago, her Rebel devotion and outspokenness got her into a little hot water. As football coach Lane Kiffin dithered about abandoning Ole Miss for LSU, Heiskell declared she would run “nekkid” around the Oxford square if Kiffin bolted. Heiskell’s vow went viral and she wound up discussing her proclamation live on “The Paul Finebaum Show” during the SEC Championship.

Of course, Kiffin left, a bitter and acrimonious separation that played out over 14 agonizing days, just as the Rebels prepped for their first College Football Playoff game in history.

Heiskell kept her clothes on. She did not and has not, however, kept her mouth shut. Sitting later at a quiet table in the back of Saint Leo’s, an Italian spot on the Oxford Square, she is asked to explain the vitriol directed at Kiffin. She gives one of her smirks.

“Well, he’s an immoral, son of a b*tch whore,” she says and then pauses. “Well, maybe leave the whore out.”

‘It will be a war zone’

The Grove is quiet on a Monday afternoon, the tree-covered acreage at the center of the Ole Miss campus looking like little more than a nice place to catch some shade from the omnipresent heat.

“It will be a war zone.” That’s what Russ Eddins, sports editor of the student newspaper, The Daily Mississippian, predicts the tailgating epicenter will feel like this Saturday, when Kiffin returns to town. So worried is the Oxford-born senior he has suggested that his family, who still live on the outskirts of the city, not come.

The setup is, to Eddins’ point, ripe for catastrophe. ESPN has slated kickoff for 6:30 p.m. local time and will bring their flagship college football program “College GameDay” to campus. Whatever lather the pre-game show doesn’t create, the hours’ worth of day drinking undoubtedly will.

Rick Cleveland first started covering Ole Miss football in 1981 as the team’s beat writer for the Clarion Ledger in Jackson. Now 73 and working for Mississippi Today, he is frankly surprised the Kiffin-Ole Miss partnership lasted as long as it did. He figured the coach, who has made a career out of chronically looking for his next move, would have left for another job long before he eventually did. Cleveland, in fact, is quick to remind folks that before he left for Baton Rouge, Kiffin also petitioned for the open jobs at Miami, Auburn and Florida.

Cleveland also presumed rightly that Kiffin’s professional wandering eye meant the pairing was destined for a bad ending. But even he is surprised at the level of venom. Despite decades of watching Ole Miss game, he can’t come up with a comparison to what the atmosphere might be like.

“I’ve seen much lesser situations where liquor bottles and beer cans have been thrown on the field,” he said. “This could get ugly.”

In her bright office a few blocks away from the Grove, Oxford Mayor Robyn Tannehill says she’s hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. The “Mama Mayor,” as she likes to call herself, is counting on her flock to mind their P’s and Q’s.

“I think this will be,” she says, pausing to choose her words carefully, “a very spirited, heated game. I think the Rebels are prepared and the city of Oxford is prepared and I think we’ll send Lane Kiffin home with a frown on his face and an L on his schedule.”

That said, Tannehill does mention that the New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama, mounted police have volunteered their assistance to monitor crowd control.

Lane leaves pain

Hell hath no fury like a football fan scorned, and Kiffin’s messy exodus from the school he raised into a playoff contender is about as bad a divorce as you’ll find in recent memory. Rick Pitino returned to Kentucky as the head coach for rival Louisville but that was after a four-year detour in the NBA. Nick Saban did a similar U-turn, going back to LSU as the Alabama head coach after a crash and burn in the NFL.

Even Ole Miss has been through this before. In 1998, Tommy Tuberville took the Rebels to their first bowl game since 1992 and, after promising he would only leave town in a pine box, turned tail two days later for Auburn. After Tuberville left, bookstores sold “Liar, Liar” T-shirts with his face plastered alongside the messaging.

But no one left quite like Kiffin. He held clandestine conversations with LSU but kept coaching Ole Miss. Mississippi administrators insisted he choose. The Louisiana governor got involved, and Kiffin finally opted for LSU less than a month before the Rebels’ playoff game against Tulane.

After agreeing to the new gig, Kiffin said he wanted to stay for the postseason but Ole Miss, rightly guessing that he also would be working to pilfer their players through the transfer portal, showed him the door.

The school promoted defensive coordinator Pete Golding to head coach. Several assistant coaches who planned to go with Kiffin to LSU stayed on with the Rebels and commuted back and forth. They beat Tulane in the first round and upset Georgia in the quarters. But by the semis against Miami, Kiffin had called two of them back to Baton Rouge.

Ole Miss lost to Miami. Eight days later, four players followed Kiffin to Baton Rouge.

“When you leave your team as it’s headed to the playoff for the first time in school history, that’s the kind of thing that will be on your tombstone,” Cleveland said. “That’s always going to be on his resume.”

Instead of venting their fury on a T-shirt, locals first chased him to the airport with everything short of pitchforks and have since spilled all sorts of tea in John Talty’s tell-all book, “Lane Being Lane.”

From the outside, it all looked slightly over the top. Kiffin is, after all, just a football coach. But to understand the level of hurt he put on the community, you have to understand the history.

Fans aren’t just bitter that he left; they’re angry he made them feel inferior, furious at the digs he took on the way out and really miffed that he left for their rival.

“Tuberville left in the dark of night, literally, and people very much resented that,” says Tannehill, an Ole Miss graduate whose husband, Rhea, served as president of the student body. “But he didn’t leave tossing grenades back at the community.”

Much more than just football

As Heiskell steers her black Audi SUV around campus for a drive-by tour, she rounds the corner in front of the Lyceum, home to the university chancellor and the first original building on campus. From the front passenger seat, Heiskell’s event coordinator, Sarah Virden, leans back and casually but candidly adds, “And you know, of course, about the bullet hole.”

On September 30, 1962, segregationist protestors rioted on campus, as Black student James Meredith attempted to enroll. The foment started the day before inside the football stadium. During halftime of the Ole Miss-Kentucky game, then-Gov. Ross Barnett grabbed the microphone and screamed to an all-White crowd, many waving Confederate flags and singing along to the marching band’s rendition of Dixie, “I love Mississippi! I love her people! Our costumes! I love and respect our heritage.”

Spurred by Barnett’s defiant message and federal officers’ arrival to escort Meredith, a mob of some 2,000 swelled by morning. Students drove around campus shouting, “Hotty Toddy! Gosh Almighty! Who the hell are we? Flim-flam, bim-bam, White folks by damn!”

By nightfall, the protests turned violent, people hurling bricks and taking down the American flag in favor of the Confederate colors. Two people were killed after protestors exchanged gunfire with federal officers, one of the bullets taking up permanent residence in the Lyceum doorframe.

That fall, the Rebels would finish 10-0, topped Arkansas in the Sugar Bowl and claim a share of the national championship. A year later, they won the last of their SEC Championships before falling into a pattern of mediocrity only temporarily paused with the arrival of Archie Manning in 1968.

The school’s slow acceptance of integration – it did not roster a Black player until 1972 – coupled with its resistance to fully divest from its offensive traditions took a toll on its football success. Ole Miss didn’t ban Confederate flags at football games until 1997. Colonel Reb, the school’s Confederate homage of a mascot, was not replaced until 2003 and there was significant resistance to that move. Finally in 2016, the last strains of “Dixie” were finally played inside the stadium.

Along the way, Ole Miss became well known for a few things related to football – the Grove’s tailgating scene and the movie “The Blind Side” about the life of former offensive lineman Michael Oher – but not the one thing that matters most in football.

Winning.

That is, if you will, the epidermis of this hurt, the outer but very sensitive layer of it all. In his six-year tenure, Kiffin won 55 games. In the nine years previously, they won 56 combined.

He made the Rebels relevant and, in return, the Ole Miss community made him palatable.

Kiffin arrived in town with a drinking problem and a reputation for drama. A short stay in the NFL ended with Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis calling his old coach a “flat-out liar.” Tennessee athletic director Mike Hamilton, who hired Kiffin off the garbage pile only to see him exit after one season, deadpanned that the coach’s stay there was “brief.” He left the Volunteers for USC, but lasted only three years before being fired on the LAX tarmac upon a pantsing at the hands of Arizona State.

Resuscitated by Saban as Alabama’s offensive coordinator, he irked the legendary coach so badly by accepting a job at Florida Atlantic that Saban canned him a week before the 2017 national championship game.

But he won at FAU, turning an outpost into a conference champion in two of his three seasons, making him hard to ignore. Kiffin could coach and two teams so in need of repair – Ole Miss and Arkansas – were willing to help him pack the baggage he invariably brought with him. Kiffin opted for the Rebels, and after two years in town, Kiffin waxed poetic about how Oxford had saved him.

“I think I needed Oxford and Ole Miss more than they needed me,” he told ESPN.

He had lost weight, stopped drinking and discovered hot yoga. He reconnected his family – his ex-wife, Layla, moving to town to be with their two youngest kids (their eldest was a student at USC). He even admitted to watching The Notebook.

He was not entirely a new Lane. He still loved to instigate, happily trolling coaches on X, but after years of dormancy, the swagger was welcome in Mississippi. “Come to the Sip” shirts and signs popped up everywhere.

“He had the ability to kind of draw the fanbase in,” Eddins says. “I wouldn’t say charming, but he was so in touch with the fans. Everything was just so much more fun.”

Especially the winning. After an initial 5-5 season, the Rebels won 10 games, went to the Sugar Bowl and finished in the top 25 for the first time since 2015. Four more bowl games followed, with regular spots in the rankings. If he made it a little too much about him, well, a narcissist can no more avoid staring at his reflection than a leopard can change his spots.

But he was their narcissist. Fans loved him, and they thought he loved them right back.

“We did nothing but support him, lift him up and love his children,” Heiskell says. “I mean, I took casseroles when his mama and daddy died. And then he up and left and we were like, ‘Why? What more could you want?’”

Rubbing salt in old, but still raw, wounds

Had it ended there, had he skulked off to LSU, it would have been bad. But in May, after the dust largely had settled, Vanity Fair published a profile of Kiffin. In an effort to explain away his decision, Kiffin reintroduced old ghosts. He told the magazine that recruits wouldn’t come to Mississippi, but they had no issue with Louisiana.

“Parents are sitting here this weekend saying the campus’ diversity feels so great: ‘It feels like there’s no segregation. And we want that for our kid because that’s the real world,’” Kiffin told Vanity Fair.

“That is not who Oxford is, and he knows that,” Tannehill said. “To degrade our community, absolutely it hurt. The Oxford of today is not the Oxford of 60 years ago.”

Tannehill, now in her third term, has overseen a boon in town. Cranes dot the landscape as more and more townhomes and developments take shape. They bring their own set of problems. Tannehill thinks more about water supply and sewage than she ever thought she might, and locals fret that the escalating costs ultimately will price them out.

But the best small college town in America, as decided this year by USA Today, is a vibrant community with old-city charms and modern appeal. Along with frequenting the 187-year-old Neilson’s department store, visitors can eat in one of four Michelin recommended restaurants.

Like a lot of SEC schools in recent years, the university has worked to change its academic profile by luring out-of-state students. Ole Miss offers scholarships ranging from $3,000 to $20,000 for non-resident students based on a sliding scale of combined GPA and test scores, and its student population reflects the recruitment. More than 50 percent of its students now come from out of state.

It is not perfect. The demographics still tilt White – 70 percent of the undergrad population compared to 24 percent Black students (for what it’s worth, LSU is 56 percent to 19 percent) – and as recently as 2014, three fraternity brothers were charged after hanging a noose around the Meredith statue that stands outside of the Lyceum.

But Oxford and Ole Miss neither defend nor hide from their past. Eddins says freshmen learn about the school’s history with all its warts in orientation, and the school’s website addresses it directly.

“Painful memories of segregation live within our campus and should not be forgotten,” it reads.

“What Kiffin said, it’s just not really how it is,” Eddins said. “And those comments aren’t going to be forgotten. I mean, I’m from here. I know I won’t forget.”

A rivalry that runs deep

Billy Abb Cannon was born in what was then called Harmanuel, Mississippi, a post office community in the northwest corner of the state that is now a proper ghost town. A 1959 story in the Clarion Ledger says his mother, Virgie, so badly wanted a girl she had no name picked out for a boy. Cannon’s father, Harvey, selected the middle name in honor of a local mill owner, Abb DeWeese.

Post World War II, the farming communities in the Piney Woods areas were dying out and, seeking better work, Harvey moved his family out of Mississippi. After a stopover in Memphis, they eventually settled in Baton Rouge.

Billy Cannon went on to become an All-American high school halfback there, and when it came to choosing a college, the proximity to his new home plus the promise of a between-semester job at a local dealership pointed Cannon away from favored Ole Miss to LSU.

There is still an abyss in my gut, from Halloween night 1959 – the night, according to the Mississippi River lore, when there arose the great Tiger Stadium roar that has not ceased since. It was the night of Billy Cannon’s Run, the 89-yard punt return that many still call the greatest ever in football. I was for the losing side.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution writer Ed Hinton penned those words some four decades after the third-ranked Rebels lost, 7-3, to No. 1 LSU. That’s how deep the wound cut; that’s also why Kiffin leaving for LSU stung as much as it did.

Ole Miss and Mississippi State play for the Golden Egg every year; the Rebels and Tigers play for blood. In 2008, the two student bodies voted to name the rivalry game the Magnolia Bowl; it is not nearly so refined.

“The only time I could cuss was when I said, ‘Go to hell, LSU,’” said Virden, Heiskell’s event coordinator, referring to the chant Rebel fans scream during the national anthem – against any and every opponent.

The two schools started playing one another in 1894 – actually seven years before the game against Mississippi State got its start – and, fueled by proximity and excellence, roared through the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s with meaningful games.

Doug Moreau caught a two-point conversion to seal an LSU win in 1964, and Archie Manning engineered two Ole Miss comebacks in 1968 and 1969. Ole Miss fans will angrily tell you about the “Night the Clock Stopped,” when LSU’s Bert Jones threw an incomplete pass with four seconds left, seemingly ending the game. Except the clock showed one second remaining. Running back Brad Davis pulled down a one-handed catch and the Tigers remained undefeated.

Cannon’s run remains the high or low point, depending on your school allegiance. It’s a burr dug even deeper in the side of Ole Miss fans after Cannon, an LSU player, became the first – and still only – Mississippian to win the Heisman Trophy.

“So much of Ole Miss’ disdain goes back to that game, but every year it was one of the biggest games in the country. Not just in the South or the Deep South, in the country,” Cleveland said. “It meant something all the time.”

The rivalry started to turn one sided after Manning left and really tipped with the arrival of Nick Saban at LSU in 2000, followed by Les Miles. The Tigers grew into a national power as Ole Miss bumbled through various coaches and an NCAA quagmire brought on by Hugh Freeze. The Tigers won 16 of 21, including five in a row from 2016 to 2020.

It finally ended on October 23, 2021, in Kiffin’s second year. Ever since, the two teams have swapped victories each season, with Kiffin stoking the flames. Faithful to his social media trolling, the coach especially enjoyed zinging LSU and Brian Kelly.

Thirty minutes after the No. 13 Rebels upset No. 4 LSU, 24-19, last year, Kiffin tweeted a picture of a quote from Kelly that read in part, “We’re going to keep that Magnolia Trophy right here in Baton Rouge right where it deserves to be.”

And his dog, Juice, “tweeted” a picture of a white hat with Rebel blue and red lettering that read, “Brian Kelly can’t run the damn ball.”

A little more than two months later, Kiffin took his job.

“Lane took this program to the cusp of what they’ve been trying to do for so long, and then he left for their archrival,” Cleveland says. “People really believed in him. They really believed him, and turns out, he just had everybody snowed.”

The promise of 2026

Heiskell will host a brunch at her home the morning of the LSU game. Later, she’ll take up her familiar spot in the Grove. She will be there, she says, to support “the boys,” as she calls her Ole Miss players.

Even absent the mayhem, this is a big football game. Both teams have legitimate national championship aspirations. The Rebels have two Heisman Trophy candidates in quarterback Trinidad Chambliss and running back Kewan Lacy (hence the political campaign-esque “Trinidad/Kewan” signs all over town), and LSU boasts one of the nation’s best defenses.

The SEC has not won a national title in three years, ceding control to the Big Ten. The league currently has six teams sitting in the top 10 (Texas, Georgia, LSU, Ole Miss, Texas A&M and Alabama). Ole Miss will play three of them this season.

“I mean, LSU is one game,” Heiskell said. “We’re looking at a full season. We’re looking at a national playoff. We’re looking at a Heisman Trophy winner. People outside, all over the land, they’re concerned with the drama and that’s fine. So sure, come to town. Spend a ton of money with us, rent out our hotels and fill our bars. But we’ve got bigger things on our minds than just beating LSU.”

Except.

As she considers what it will be like to remove that flag from the lineup outside The Library, Heiskell throws open the door to the bar. The woman whose Instagram handle is “Debutante Farmer” then adds an exclamation point to her declaration.

“F**k yeah!” she yells, and the door slams shut behind her.

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