Oxford is preparing for Lane Kiffin’s return the way a city prepares for a storm. That should tell you how personally Ole Miss fans took his exit.
Oxford Police Chief Jeff McCutchen confirmed his department is bringing in outside help for Saturday, when Kiffin walks back into Vaught-Hemingway Stadium as the head coach of LSU. McCutchen shot down rumors about the National Guard being involved, but he did confirm that additional horse-mounted patrols are being brought in from as far away as New Orleans and Mobile.
“I feel like it will probably be one of the biggest crowds that any of us have ever seen, and so you take that into consideration,” McCutchen said, via Jake Holcomb of WTVA.
There Is Precedent, and It Is Not Pretty
Anyone calling this overkill has not been paying attention. When Kiffin went back to Tennessee, the school he left in the middle of the night years earlier, the scene deteriorated into something close to a riot late in the game. Golf balls and water bottles came out of the stands.
Oxford has a fresher wound. Kiffin left last offseason, and the manner of the departure is what turned the fan base venomous. Rebels fans booed him on a runway. The relationship did not end with a handshake and a thank-you video.
Add the fact that both teams enter Saturday ranked in the top ten and you have an SEC crowd that will be loud, drunk, and holding a personal grudge. Police planning for the worst is not paranoia. It is arithmetic.
The Football Part Actually Matters Too
Lost in the security talk is that this is one of the best games on the Week 4 slate. LSU opens as the favorite, which raises the stakes on Kiffin considerably. Beating the program he left, in their building, with a hostile crowd screaming at him, is the kind of afternoon that defines a coach’s first year at a new job.
Losing it is the other kind. If Ole Miss knocks off LSU in Oxford, every clip of Kiffin getting booed becomes permanent content, and the narrative that he bailed on a good thing for a bigger paycheck gets a receipt attached to it.
Kiffin knows all of this. He has spent his entire career being the villain in someone’s story, and he has never once looked bothered by it. If anything, he feeds on it. Expect him to say something on social media this week that pours gasoline on the whole thing, because that is who he is.
What to Watch
The crowd noise will be a genuine factor for LSU’s offense, particularly on any snap inside the Ole Miss 30. Kiffin will have prepared for it, and he is one of the better play-callers in the sport at manufacturing easy completions to settle an offense down.
The real question is whether Ole Miss can keep its own emotions in check. Teams playing in revenge games with a rabid home crowd tend to start hot and then hit a wall of penalties. Ole Miss committing three personal fouls in the first quarter would be the most Ole Miss thing possible on Saturday.
Either way, the police are ready. That may be the most telling sentence written about a college football game all season.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.