Before Layla Kiffin even sat down at our table at Cocha, we were talking about basketball.
She had been a point guard — I had too.
“I was scrappy,” she said. “I also ended up coaching all three of my kids’ teams for years.”
She did it so she could make the schedules. She never wanted to miss a game.
Kiffin, 51, is the former wife of LSU head football coach Lane Kiffin and the mother of his three children. When he moved to Louisiana last year, so did they.
She’s adjusting to life in Baton Rouge but had not been to Cocha yet. After a review of the menu, she ordered the beet and burrata salad and asked the waitress which protein was best to add. She took the waitress’s advice: shrimp. I ordered the seared tuna salad.
Louisiana culture editor Jan Risher and Layla Kiffin had lunch at Cocha in downtown Baton Rouge.
From there, we launched into a rambling conversation that ranged from point guards to panna cotta, with stops at the NFL, a Victoria’s Secret runway and a 100-row climb through the stands in Oxford.
Football forever
She told me about her early life. Her father, John Reaves, was a first-round draft pick of the Philadelphia Eagles. He played quarterback for 14 years in the NFL and USFL and later coached.
“A player is a lot different than a coach,” she said. “Coaching is a lot harder. I mean, they put in so many more hours, and especially now with all the money involved. It’s very cutthroat.”
LSU president Wade Rousse and athletic director Verge Ausberry pose with new head football coach Lane Kiffin and his family, Layla, Landry and Knox, after a introductory press conference on Monday, Dec. 1, 2025 at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge.
She said when she met Lane, whose father’s life had followed a similar trajectory, they instantly connected over their shared experiences. In the early days of their relationship, they did the football math of their lives. She had moved 23 times. He had moved 19.
Even so, she made the basketball team at every new school.
She acknowledged that high school was hard.
“Girls were so mean,” she said. “I don’t ever want to be that. I don’t want my daughters to be that.”
Life in Florida
She finished high school in Gainesville at 17, when her dad was coaching at the University of Florida. She stayed there for college, majoring in conference and meeting planning because she saw that as a way to stay connected to working in sports. A 1997 Outback Bowl internship led to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Layla Kiffin at lunch at Cocha restaurant in Baton Rouge on Monday, Oct. 26, 2026.
At 23, she was promoted to department director for special events with the Buccaneers.
When she started talking about special events and game-day productions, I knew exactly what she meant. I planned special events professionally for 17 years.
People think the work is glamorous. We both knew better. It is physical. Success often depends on knowing every person on the crew, down to the one most likely to drop the ball.
“If you don’t have relationships, it’s not going to work,” she said.
She talked about the Bucs’ new owners who wanted a pirate ship in the end zone and had ideas no NFL team had tried yet.
“We were like, ‘There’s no way we’re gonna get this done,’” she said. “And we did. I didn’t know that I was capable of doing things like that.”
Monte Kiffin, Lane’s dad, was coaching the Bucs’ defense then.
When Lane came to visit, she said they hit it off immediately.
“He and I grew up with such similar lives,” she said. “It was just so familiar.”
They dated for a year and were engaged for three months.
“I don’t recommend it,” she said with a smile.
They married at 25 and stayed married for 17 years.
Oxford and beyond
Like Layla Kiffin, I grew up in a football family, although on a much smaller scale. My father coached high school football in Mississippi. We both know the family’s mood rises and falls with 18-year-old boys.
“Your whole livelihood is whether they catch a ball,” she said.
Layla Kiffin with her son Knox in 2016.
We also talked about how the criticism gets so personal. I remember hearing grown men in the stands talk about my father’s penchant for going “up the middle” too often. It isn’t rational. It still hurts.
Then she told me about Oxford.
She only lived there for one year. She moved there in 2025 from California because their son, Knox wanted to go to high school near his father.
When Florida and LSU came after Lane Kiffin last fall, he said the decision had to be a family one.
Layla Kiffin coached all three of her children’s sports team, including her son Knox’s Manhattan Beach Youth basketball team.
Layla toured both places. Her father is in the Florida Hall of Fame, but she told Lane that she didn’t think Florida was the right fit.
“My dad’s rolling over in his grave,” she said.
Oxford is still a tender topic.
Because my mom lives about 40 minutes from Ole Miss, I was there last year for parts of its magical football season. I registered the hope that had Ole Miss people buzzing. They were proud. They were hopeful. Then Lane Kiffin left.
And all those emotions turned into something else.
By the time Ole Miss and LSU met in Oxford in September, the emotions surrounding his departure had reached a level I had never witnessed in decades of following football in Louisiana and Mississippi. I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Sports writers and broadcasters across the country were saying the same thing.
The game had become about much more than football.
The Kiffins’ older daughter, Landry, 21, wanted her mother to go with her to the game in Oxford. Landry is still an Ole Miss student.
The plan was to watch from a box. When they arrived, the elevators weren’t working. So, police escorted Layla, and Landry, plus Lane Kiffin’s sister, several coaches and the university president, up through the stands instead.
Landry Kiffin takes a seat with her mother Layla Kiffin for the press conference to introduce Lane Kiffin as the new LSU football coach on Monday, Dec. 1, 2025 at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge.
She thinks they may have climbed 100 rows.
“Very classy-looking grown adults standing and cussing at us,” she said. “It almost seemed like a staged bad movie — and we were just running up.”
She said hundreds of people were pointing at them, yelling and cursing them by name.
The mother in her took over.
“I just either want to cry ’cause I’m so mad at you for speaking like this to my child, or I want to hurt you,” she said.
By the time they reached the top, both mother and daughter were shaking.
“What would happen if your kid walked up these stands and adults yelled at your child like that?” she said.
‘A good mom week’
These days, Knox, 17, is a junior at University High in Baton Rouge, where he’s playing football. Landry has launched a clothing line and had a pop-up show in California. Presley Kiffin, 20, gave up playing volleyball at USC so she could have a more typical college experience. She recently signed with a small modeling agency but hadn’t booked a job until Victoria’s Secret called a few weeks ago.
Layla Kiffin, pictured here in 2013 with her daughters Landry and Presley and son Knox. Layla’s former husband, Lane Kiffin, was the University of Southern California’s head football coach from 2010-2013.
“I’m not sure that I can see you in lingerie,” Layla told her daughter, who was still 19 at the time.
When Presley went to a fitting with Victoria’s Secret on Oct. 16, she was sure they would send her home. Instead, they put her in the outfit and said she was in. The show was two days later on her birthday.
Layla flew out to be with her daughter the night before the show. Presley practiced in her mother’s shoes.
From one mom to another, I asked if she had photos from the show. She showed me a short video. I’m no expert, but Presley looked as if she had walked runways for years.
Between Landry’s pop-up, Presley’ show and Knox’s high school football, Layla said, “I’ve had a good mom week.”
Finding her groove in Baton Rouge
She admits that Baton Rouge was hard at first.
Lane was always at the office with his new job at LSU. She was living in Raising Cane’s founder Todd Graves’ guest house with her ex-husband and teenage son while trying to find a house of her own. The transition was especially tough on Knox, who had made great friends in Oxford and loved living there.
“You’re only happy as your most unhappy kid,” she said.
She told Knox they were not going back to Oxford.
Then she found a house and decided to open Livin Studio with its 105-degree heated strength/sculpt classes and red-light therapy. She believes the studio’s classes can help people feel better and live healthier lives.
Throwing herself into building the business has helped her find her place and people in Baton Rouge.
Her contractor had never worked with a humidifier and had to consult people outside the area to learn how to install one properly. Who, after all, in Baton Rouge wants additional humidity?
The 5:30 a.m. class fills with LSU coaches. Lane is a regular. For Halloween, an instructor dressed as a police officer wrote him a ticket for complaining too early in the morning.
Customers take an exercise class at Layla Kiffin’s Livin Studio on Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026, in Baton Rouge.
“He truly is a shy person,” Layla said. “ I’m very grateful that we do get along, ’cause I, I wouldn’t be able to do it. It’d be too hard.”
She said they are finding a rhythm to life in Baton Rouge, which includes having regular dinners with his brother Chris and Chris’ wife, Angela.
“It’s just complicated, and it is what it is,” she said.
About that panna cotta
When it came time for dessert, the waitress described a dark chocolate spicy panna cotta.
“What’s that exactly?” Layla asked.
I appreciate a person who is willing to try a dessert. Even more, I appreciate someone who asks rather than nodding along.
We ordered the panna cotta, which had a little cayenne bite to it. Layla took bite after bite, trying to name the layer that tasted different.
Layla Kiffin is pictured on Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026, at Livin Studio in Baton Rouge.
Before we left, she told me about her hunt for old cypress for the studio’s bathroom counter. Her contractor sent her to a man more than an hour away who pulls sunken cypress out of the water.
On one of her first solo Louisiana adventures, she drove out to the site to look at the wood. When she pulled up, she said she texted Lane and his assistant in case she didn’t come back.
She came back.
Not living in his shadow
Most mornings, she’s at Livin Studio before the 5:30 a.m. class, making sure nothing went wrong overnight. She takes at least one class herself every day, sometimes two. She plays on USTA tennis teams here and sometimes flies back to California for matches with her old ones.
At night, she cooks dinner for her son.
When I asked how she handles people seeing only one side of her, she talked about Los Angeles. A USC coach’s wife doesn’t get much attention there, she said. People are too busy looking over their shoulders for Brad Pitt.
“I just got to know people for me, not as Lane’s wife,” Layla said. “Just me as a person, me as a mom. I never felt like I was living in his shadow.”
Baton Rouge is different.
She knows that.
“The right people who know me, know me,” she said.
