Deciphering Lane Kiffin's tweets amid the transfer portal window
Few coaches are as active and raw on Twitter as Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin, who has seemingly made a sport out of poking, prodding and sometimes outright trolling other programs.
And while Ole Miss has been recruiting the transfer portal quite diligently, Kiffin has not been shy about firing off tweets.
It’s not always readily apparent what Kiffin is getting at, though. A few of his more recent tweets, though? They have some obvious connections.
Take for instance, the tweet Kiffin sent on Saturday, showing a Tennessee private plane parked in front of a Ruby Tuesday sign. Kiffin tweeted the picture with two shark emojis. By the end of the day on Saturday, the Rebels had picked up two commitments… from Tennessee transfers.
“Before the commitments happened, if you did not know or do not follow us on Twitter or go to the website, Tamarion McDonald, safety from Tennessee, and Tyler Baron, edge guy from Tennessee, both committed on Saturday,” said OMSpirit’s Zach Berry on the Andy Staples On3 show. “So he went to visit them in Knoxville.
“Then actually on the way back to Oxford he stopped in Memphis to meet with — so Baron was still in Knoxville, Tamarion McDonald was in Memphis. Originally from there. Went to White Haven High School. So little troll there for Josh Heupel and company. Maybe a little play on the tarmac stuff, he’s at an airport.”
Kiffin, of course, famously left Tennessee in the middle of the night to take the USC job after coaching there just one year. Later he was fired on the tarmac at USC.
But that was far from Lane Kiffin’s only tweet in recent days.
He also tweeted a famous gif from the movie ‘Field of Dreams,’ with the caption “If you build it, he will come.” Berry explained what he thought that reference meant.
“That has to be, I mean it’s a little bit like a 5,000-foot view of, hey, Lane Kiffin just about to wrap up Year 4,” Berry said. “He’s had two 10-win regular seasons. Never been done before. He’s trying to win an 11th game against Penn State in the Peach Bowl, never been done. So, yeah, probably a testament to the work he and the staff have done to build the program.
“It’s a national brand now. They’re getting a lot more respect from folks that, hey, it’s not just well Lane’s going to be there for two years and then he’s going to bounce and go somewhere else. I think he kind of gets, OK, the Grove Collective is doing really well, we’ve got a really good quarterback, we’ve got a really good running back, defensive coordinator probably a top-five defensive coordinator in the country. I mean Year 1, Pete Golding top-25 SP+ defense, that’s pretty impressive.”
However, there’s another, perhaps more obvious, way to interpret that tweet from Kiffin. It could very well be about the biggest potential portal pull the program has had yet — and Ole Miss has already built a really impressive class from the transfer portal.
“So you can look at it that way, but also, yeah, he’s talking about Walter Nolen,” Berry said. “Still on campus, I believe, as we’re recording this. Full weekend visit. Family was all there. Ole Miss expects to land Walter Nolen. I think Alabama came in a little bit late to try to get an 11th-hour visit from him, but I do not think it’s going to happen.
“But yeah, I think that’s what is in reference to, is the No. 1 overall prospect in the portal, former No. 1 overall player in the country, yeah, he’s built the program, now he’s waiting on him to come.”
There are several other interesting Lane Kiffin tweets out in the ether, but those are the two generating the most interest right now.
Time will tell whether Kiffin’s field of dreams will spring into reality like in the movie.