Lane Kiffin and Mike Leach each on Saturday is getting his first foray into the 'Egg Bowl' rivalry, the presumptive Battle for Mississippi where coaches sometimes get stays of execution with victory, see Moorhead, Joe; circa 2019, and celebrations can be as bizarre as, well, a golden egg trophy.
Kiffin and Leach, it seems, go quite a ways back. Not that Kiffin knows or shares with absolute certainty how Leach came to call him some 15 years ago when Leach was at Texas Tech and Kiffin at Southern Cal.
“Somehow, he got my number from my dad (Monte Kiffin, former NFL defensive coordinator and current Ole Miss analyst) or something like that. He was at Tech and I was an assistant at USC.
“He would just call from time to time to talk ball. We were really good at the time. I think he was wondering how we did things there under Coach (Pete) Carroll.”
Leach earlier this week in his standard deadpan-delivery said, “We both knew Monte, though Lane knew him first.”
Kiffin said he has at times looked at Leach's unique offense, which entered the SEC this year with a brutalizing win against LSU but then struggled much of the season to score points, but has found it difficult to just pluck concepts from Leach's vaunted 'Air Raid' system.
“We've looked at it but not that much,” Kiffin said. “It's so unique, I don't think really you can take pieces of it. I think you have to go all in with how much they throw it and how little they run it.”
When told that Leach had ranked holidays on Wednesday's SEC coaches' teleconference, and had barely included Thanksgiving in his top five (at No. 4), Kiffin said, "Yeah, Mike's good at those questions and gives you guys these really long answers."
Leach on Tuesday at his regular press conference expounded on his relationship with Kiffin and heralded Kiffin's lack of being “boring” as a good thing for college football and the SEC.
“He’s an enjoyable guy,” Leach told reporters. “The worst thing, especially in this day and age in coaching or in life or anytime you’re doing something as repetitious as football, you try to avoid as many boring people as you can.
“Lane’s not boring, so I’ve always been excited to spend time with him if you’re stuck at one of these coaching meeting things that everybody pretends are so important. Lane lightens it up a little bit, and I for one am happy he’s there.”