In 'The Many Lives of Lane Kiffin' Oxford and Ole Miss saves the most important one of them all

Sitting down and watching ‘The Many Lives of Lane Kiffin,’ the E:60 special chronicling the adventure of Kiffin’s professional career arc, it is easy to come away with the conclusion that we should re-work the popular phrase ‘a cat has nine lives.’

Should the cat be replaced by Kiffin? Maybe a laughable tongue-in-cheek suggestion but one that Kiffin himself might even support.

Taking it even further, having watched the ESPN special, which airs on Wednesday at 6 p.m. CT, stealing a phrase from Cousin Eddie in ‘National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation’ of “if that cat had nine lives it just spent all of them” is even valid.

Through the last two decades it feels like Kiffin has spent all nine of his, over and over again. Yet here in 2025 he has survived it all, come through the fire and getting philosophical as he turns 50.

The opening moments show Kiffin in one of his hot yoga sessions, part of his once every day that is a “non-negotiable,” in what turns into a visual metaphor for where he is with coming to terms with the events that led him to Oxford.

“Yoga teaches you to stay in these poses, like hard poses. Ones that at first you can’t do,” Kiffin says. “So it’s taught me to get really uncomfortable and sit in it, and that’s life. If you’re going to do it well you better learn to get uncomfortable and sit in it instead of running from it. A lot of times in my life I ran from things that were uncomfortable. You got to sit in it.”

From there it is off the races and those many lives of Kiffin come flooding back with images of the burning mattresses in Knoxville to the Al Davis slide show press conference and everything in between.

Yes, even the tarmac firing.

Kiffin is candid in those moments that are now flashpoints to how he arrives at Ole Miss.

Interviewed by ESPN’s Ryan McGee, Kiffin appears to bare his soul and give his version of how those events went down.

A young, brash up-and-coming coaching prospect that rushes through the ranks of grad assistant to assistant coach to suddenly the head coach of the Oakland Raiders and then the Tennessee Volunteers.

“There was just this perfect storm of becoming this villain,” Kiffin says.

That press conference in Knoxville, which in hindsight is universally agreed was a bad idea, then leads to the unrest by the Tennessee students just outside the athletics offices as Kiffin dashes off into the night on a flight to Los Angeles.

From there the up and down tenure at Southern California that ends in a private office just off the tarmac at LAX.

In what could only be viewed as an ‘Of course they did it this way’ moment the question is posed who would take a chance on Kiffin at this point and in to focus comes Nick Saban sitting down with grin that has to be seen to be believed.

After nearly 40 minutes Kiffin’s arrival to Oxford enters the story.

After those successes in Boca Raton, Florida at Florida Atlantic the next question is posed of who is going to be the big school to bring Kiffin back into the spotlight.

We all know it is Ole Miss athletics director Keith Carter.

Kiffin’s landing at the Oxford-University Airport is shown with the clip of him holding up the baby for a photo. Then followed the press conference quip of it being a better memory than his last tarmac experience.

Then there is a quote that maybe Kiffin has never said, publicly at least.

“I came here judgy, you know, of like people and how it was and how slow it was,” Kiffin said of Oxford. “Then I stopped judging and realized, ‘Wait, maybe they’re on to something.’ Maybe slower is just a better way to live.”

Interviews with his daughter, Landry, and his son, Knox, are intertwined through the final minutes as Kiffin is seen becoming that family man he never was until these last couple years.

Oxford might not have needed Kiffin but he needed Oxford, the sixth-year Ole Miss head coach re-iterates, as he has several times in press conferences in recent years.

Most of what is covered will not be a surprise to the die-hard college football fan but what might surprise people is how it appears, for now, Oxford is the place that saved the most important life of Lane Kiffin’s.