Former Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin was the talk of college football in late November as his future in Oxford was widely debated as the Rebels completed their best-ever regular season. Kiffin was heavily linked with both the LSU Tigers and Florida Gators jobs after the firing of Brian Kelly and Billy Napier, respectively.
Why is Lane Kiffin Accused of Using Florida for More Money?
Ultimately, Kiffin controversially departed Ole Miss despite leading them to a spot in the College Football Playoff and opted to take the highly lucrative LSU job.
In a clip posted on the Gators’ YouTube channel on Monday, former Florida quarterback Danny Wuerffel opined that Kiffin had used the program in his negotiations with LSU to get a bigger paycheque.
“From the get-go, we were very committed to finding the right coach,” Wuerffel said. “Chances of anyone coming into any program and leading you to win a bunch of national championships is just tough. Who do you think gives you the best chance? There’s one coach that fit that, a tier one and that person initially showed a lot of interest in Florida.
“There was a lot of focus on Lane. It seemed like he was leaning to Florida and that sort of changed. He didn’t ever really explain it. I got the sense that over a period of time in that window, perhaps he had decided he was going somewhere else, but his agent didn’t want them to say that ’cause they may have been using us as leverage to get more money.”
Wuerffel, who led the Gators to their first national championship in 1996 and won the Heisman Trophy, convened the Gators’ committee to appoint the program’s new coach alongside athletic director Scott Stricklin and associate athletic director Duke Werner.
How Kiffin Ghosted Florida
During an interview with On3 in December, Stricklin revealed that Kiffin ghosted the Gators, despite initial positive interactions, after the LSU job fell vacant and he began negotiations with the Tigers.
“There was a flurry of initial engagement,” Stricklin said, “I would say really positive conversations. The communication became a little more erratic. The timing of when that began to occur, reading the tea leaves, gave me the impression that it was a good thing we’d talked to other people. We were going to have to look at some other candidates.”
After a historic season during which he led the Tulane Green Wave to the College Football Playoff, Jon Sumrall was subsequently appointed as the Gators’ new head coach to replace Napier.
