The north video board welcomes new LSU head football coach Lane Kiffin on Monday, December 1, 2025 at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Southeastern Conference football media days start Monday in Tampa, Florida, which means in essence the 2026 football season is upon us.
In the name of NIL, the transfer portal, conference realignment and College Football Playoff expansion, it’s not a moment too soon. Talking season will finally, at least in part, transition into some talk about quarterbacks and offensive and defensive alignments.
And Lane Kiffin. Leave no doubt that the first-year LSU coach and college football’s favorite dart board will be one of the main attractions.
The gross tonnage of words that will be written and spoken about Kiffin will likely be enough to fill Tampa Bay before it’s all done.
And lest you think that the SEC saved Kiffin and the rest of the LSU contingent for Thursday — just before the media days closing ceremony — purely at random, think again. Attendance was apparently starting to get light on the final day, so the SEC wanted to hold one of its headliners for last. LSU and Texas — whose coach Steve Sarkisian has recently outpaced Kiffin in attention-grabbing comments, along with Texas quarterback Arch Manning — will close out the SEC football showcase summer event.
Kiffin has been mostly in radio silence as of late. He’s done a couple of interviews, including a news conference in late May at the SEC spring meetings, but he hasn’t posted anything on his X account since May 11. In Kiffin years, that’s an eternity.
That changes this week, of course. The Kiffin faucet will be open full throttle, including an upcoming book about him. Just don’t expect Kiffin to stand at the media days podium and start blasting away with a bunch of hot takes. That’s not his preferred medium.
LSU is the third different SEC school that Kiffin will represent at media days, following Ole Miss (stop that hissing, will you?) and Tennessee. He will be the first coach to do that, and he officially is the first man to coach three different SEC teams. Paul “Bear” Bryant technically did it by coaching Alabama, Kentucky and Texas A&M, but his stint in College Station was back in the Aggies’ days in the long-defunct Southwest Conference.
While on a social-media diet, Kiffin apparently has been making his presence felt in other ways. Recruiting expert Steve Wiltfong of On3/Rivals recently predicted that LSU will flip Brother Martin’s Easton Royal — the nation’s top-rated receiver and No. 6 prospect overall — away from Texas. That could make for an interesting encounter if Kiffin and Sarkisian cross paths Thursday.
Then there’s scheduling. On Friday, LSU announced that it is adding four nonconference games against in-state opponents to its schedules over the next four seasons: Northwestern State in 2027, Southern and UL-Monroe in 2028, and Tulane in 2030.
Three of those games — Northwestern State next season, ULM in ’28 and Tulane in ’30 — will be season openers. The lone outlier in that run will be 2029, when LSU opens against SMU at the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.
That game will be a throwback to the kind of Power Four opener LSU has played, and struggled to win, since 2021. The kind of opener LSU will play this season when it hosts Clemson on Sept. 5. Kiffin likes those kinds of high-stakes openers as much as he likes a dirt-stained visor. Clearly it looks like LSU is building out a string of openers to his liking.
By the way, when Kiffin was at Ole Miss, the Rebels lost their 2020 opener to Florida 51-35 when SEC teams played a conference-only 10-game schedule because of the pandemic. After that, Ole Miss beat Louisville 43-24 in Atlanta, then Troy 28-10 in 2022, Mercer 73-7 in 2023, Furman 76-0 in 2024 and Georgia State 63-7 in 2025.
You can see where this is going.
As for the opponents, LSU has shown a preference for keeping the guaranteed money in state as much as possible, so these games make sense. But frankly, I didn’t think the Tigers would play Southern again after what looked like a one-off in 2022, and I didn’t know whether LSU ever would play Tulane again after last facing the Green Wave way back in 2009.
Younger LSU fans never have seen their team lose to Tulane, with an 18-game winning streak for the Tigers since a 31-28 upset loss in 1982. I think it’s great to see another meeting on the books against LSU’s oldest and once most-played rival (Mississippi State now has that distinction), especially since Tulane reached the CFP this past season, losing to Ole Miss.
But those are games to focus on later. The attention is on what may well be the most anticipated LSU football season ever — where it should be.
