Ryan McGee reveals if he could see Lane Kiffin leaving Ole Miss for Florida

ESPN’s Ryan McGee is as familiar with Ole Miss’ Lane Kiffin right now as anyone, considering the release last week of ‘E60: The Many Lives of Lane Kiffin’. Their promotional run did cause another stir, though, about whether the Rebels’ head coach would consider going elsewhere, specifically down to The Swamp.

On the ‘College GameDay Podcast’ on Monday, McGee discussed with Dan Wetzel and Max Olson about Kiffin’s potential candidacy for the job at Florida. He retold the story once more, with it gaining traction again last week with the release of the documentary, of how sure that the Gators’ boosters wanted Kiffin as recently as a year ago.

“I went on the Florida radio show and told this story that Paul Finebaum and I – I saw Paul on Friday when we got to Georgia and Paul is like, ‘We’ve told that story on my show ten times?’. I go, ‘Yeah, clearly no one’s listening to your show,'” McGee joked.

“The story is that, you know, because I co-host a show on the SEC Network, a lot of times when we go into towns – which, by the way, we’re going to Gainesville this weekend so this will probably come up. We sometimes have these mandated dinners that we go to, and we had this dinner at Scott Stricklin’s house. I think Scott is a great guy and, you know, catches a lot of arrows but I think he’s done a pretty good job. And, at this dinner, at these dinners, there’s always a lot of, you know, very important people wearing technicolor jackets and gray hair, you know, that donate a lot of money.

“And, this was the Texas A&M game, week three. We’d been there weeks one and three. They got hammered by Miami in week one. They were going to lose to A&M in week three. And, a lot of these boosters were coming up to us, me and Paul, and saying, ‘Hey, just so you know, after we lose to A&M on Saturday, we’ll have Lane Kiffin in here by the middle of October’. Like, multiple people said it. And, of course, as we know now? Yes, they lost to A&M. They didn’t lose much the rest of the year, and Billy Napier turned it around.

“And so, Paul and I? We had just told that story on his show the Friday before, when we were talking about the Lane Kiffin thing. So, that story was regurgitated by me, because I thought everyone at this point had heard it. And so that caught some Twitter kindling. I woke up the next morning and everybody in Florida is texting me, and I’m like, ‘What? What are you talking about?'”

With that retold, McGee doesn’t actually think Kiffin would leave Ole Miss for Florida. That opinion is multifaceted within the SEC considering what Kiffin is currently accomplishing in Oxford, how hard the job is in Gainesville, and that he thinks he would only be definitely interested in one other job in the country and it’s in-conference too down in T-Town.

“The point was, the question was do you think – would Lane Kiffin leave Ole Miss? I think Lane Kiffin would leave Ole Miss if Tuscaloosa called. People in Gainesville are convinced that, if they call, he’ll leave. And, for folks that don’t know, his ex-wife, Layla, who now lives in Oxford and they’re hanging out all the time? You know, her dad was the legendary quarterback’s coach during the Steve Spurrier years, so there are ties to Florida,” said McGee. “But, I don’t know that he’ll leave Oxford because, as you saw on the doc, he’s really happy. Like, why do you mess with happy? And so, the Florida people don’t want to hear that.

“I’ve told people. It goes back to your point earlier. If the school is willing to commit? And Ole Miss got ahead of the curve on this thing – on NIL, on all of it. And, if they continue to promise to commit and continue to commit what they’ve done up to this point, I’m not sure why you would leave. And, don’t mess with happy…Would he be willing to mess with happy? And, he messed with happy one time and, you know, we basically did half a documentary about it, about him leaving Knoxville – and, quite frankly, they think all the time about what it would have been like had we stayed, but the one place that would have made him leave was USC. I think there’s one place that he would leave Ole Miss for, and I think it’s just up the road in Tuscaloosa and I don’t think they’re going to have a job open anytime soon.”

Take Alabama out of it with where things are this moment with Kalen DeBoer, as that’s not the case at Florida with the status of Billy Napier. But, again, with where the two jobs stand as far as expectations, McGee knows how much harder it is to be at a job like Florida.

“Listen, I want to be clear about this. I love going to Gainesville. I’m excited to go this weekend. The Swamp is The Swamp. I mean, it’s awesome. But, that job? It’s like those pictures you see of Presidents of the United States, what they look like on their first day on the job and what they look like when they left after four years or eight years. They’ve aged 50 years,” added McGee. “That job is really, really difficult…It’s a difficult place to coach because their expectation level, and rightfully so, is as high as it is.”

With who we’re talking about here, there’s no telling when it comes to his next move. Even so, Kiffin has it going right now at Ole Miss, having won ten-plus games in three of his five seasons there with the Rebels well on their way to another along with a potential playoff berth, both on and off the field – to the point that he may not be thinking of anywhere else but The ‘Sip.

“So, I don’t know. But, you know, I’ve been wrong on so many of these things so many times, and I might be prisoner of the moment because of the documentary and because of all of those things,” said McGee. “But, you know, again, he is really, really happy, and it’s not just football. But, man, football is pretty good too. So, I’m not sure why you would leave at this point.”