Paul Finebaum contemplates whether Lane Kiffin would leave Ole Miss for Florida

Paul Finebaum contemplated if Lane Kiffin would leave for Florida this time around if the Gators fire Billy Napier. Following a loss to USF last week and now a turnover plagued loss to LSU, Florida is 1-2 and Napier’s seat is only getting hotter.

There were rumors Kiffin could leave Ole Miss for Florida, had the latter made a change last season. But Kiffin was also linked to the Auburn job in the event of an opening.

However, Kiffin is “entrenched” at Ole Miss, as Finebaum put it. Now that it’s a year later after the Florida smoke, Kiffin might be even more of a pipe dream for Gator fans.

“But here’s the problem, though, I agree with you that this has been their Waterloo, but when you’re sitting there at 20-21 and I think it’s something like (10-15) in the SEC, how do you make a case not to do it over again,” Finebaum said on The Matt Barrie Show. “I was at the Dallas airport yesterday watching football … and a guy yelled at me from behind the bar … so he’s wearing a gator hat. Okay. I said, So what do you think? He said, We got to get rid of Napier. I said, who do you want … And I knew what the answer was. He said, Lane, got to grab him. 

“Now that’s great. That was the one last year. But we’re about to hear on this E:60 in a couple of days that Lane Kiffin is entrenched in Oxford. He didn’t take the Auburn job because his daughter Landry just moved there and begged him not to. So now, is he going to walk away from what’s a really good job and a really great place to go to, a place that has won very infrequently in history?”

Kiffin is off to a 3-0 start this season with Ole Miss and is 47-18 with the Rebels since taking the head coaching gig in 2020. He has three double digit win seasons in Oxford and it seems like he could do it again this year.

Could that lead to the College Football Playoff, getting Ole Miss there for the first time? Kiffin seems to be proving he’s made for that task and starting over at Florida would be quite the change at this point. Even if Florida might be moving on from Napier before or at season’s end.

“A year ago, as I told you, he would have taken it, but it’s a year later,” Finebaum said. “You don’t know. I think all of us like Billy Napier, but I think it’s hard to make a strong case, if you’re Scott Stricklin, you know, why do you keep him? Because he I mean, at least Saturday night, there (weren’t) about 10 things Billy Napier did wrong that you can point to. 

“That’s usually the case after a Billy Napier loss, so I mean it was a clean loss if there’s such a thing. But it was still the second loss of the season, and the schedule is just, it’s just suffocating.”