OXFORD, Miss. — “We’ve got some Lane Kiffin-signed footballs we need to get rid of if you want some.”
Walker Jones said it with a smile as he walked a visitor out of his office at Ole Miss’ Grove Collective. Those footballs used to help pay for players. Now they’re a punchline. And kind of a nuisance.
“We actually have a lot of those, right?” Jones, the collective’s executive director, asked.
A staff member looked up and nodded with a sigh.
“Oh yeah,” he said.
In a month, Oxford will be the center of the college football universe. Kiffin, once the center of the Ole Miss universe, will make his return with rival LSU on Sept. 17, less than 10 months after his acrimonious departure on the cusp of Ole Miss’ College Football Playoff debut. Vaught-Hemingway Stadium is expected to be a cauldron of animosity, a fan base directing its ire at the man they once revered and hoping for a win that will send the ultimate message.
But on this early August day, families are moving their kids into town. People from New York, Michigan, Colorado and all over mingle on The Square, the epicenter of downtown. Things are moving forward.
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Oxford, a city of about 25,000, has become a retirement destination. Locals say some of it can be traced to the (sporadic) success of its football program, just enough highs between Eli Manning, Houston Nutt, Hugh Freeze and Kiffin. But when you attach it to William Faulkner and John Grisham, the town gets an added veneer.
Enrollment at the school has spiked by 31 percent since 2020, Kiffin’s first season in charge. Applications also went up. You can see why the Ole Miss administration embraced football and gave the program the resources it needed to break through in the new era.
Ultimately, it wasn’t enough for Kiffin.
Now, the school and football team left behind have a mission.
“We’ve got a chip on our shoulder,” Jones said. “We’re bigger than one person.”
Keith Carter looked at his phone about an hour after the Egg Bowl last November. The message Carter saw may have been the most heartening he had received in months.
Carter, the Ole Miss athletic director, had been working on two tracks the last few months. On one, he was trying to convince Kiffin he could win at Ole Miss if he stayed, while also making clear that if Kiffin did take the LSU or Florida jobs, he would not be able to coach Ole Miss in the Playoff.
The other track was finding a potential replacement. Carter was looking at Tulane’s Jon Sumrall, South Florida’s Alex Golesh and others. Then he got a text from Pete Golding, his team’s defensive coordinator:
“I want this job.”
Pete Golding played Division II football in Mississippi and spent the first decade of his career coaching at lower levels. (Christian Petersen / Getty Images)
Golding was already under consideration. But privately, he had waffled, still in the midst of the season, not totally sure Kiffin was really going to leave. Now it was clear, and Golding said he told himself: “You really want to work for somebody else? Everything’s kind of in place (here), and you came here for a reason. Like, all right, take advantage. The timing is now.”
So he sent the text. And with Ole Miss about to make the Playoff, Carter didn’t budge on letting Kiffin coach. He made Golding, who had never been a head coach, Kiffin’s full-time replacement.
“It helped me to come to some finality,” Carter said. “Because we had been through basically a nationwide coaching search for the past four weeks behind the scenes. It was cool for him to proactively reach out and say: ‘I’m ready.’”
Golding, in many ways, is the opposite of Kiffin. Kiffin, the son of a longtime NFL assistant, had been a head coach in the NFL, at Tennessee, Southern California and Florida Atlantic, and used Ole Miss to re-establish himself. Golding was a small-school product, a player at Division II Delta State, who slowly worked his way up in coaching, never working at a power-conference school until Nick Saban plucked him from UTSA in 2017 to be defensive coordinator.
“There’s a humility component of coming up that way,” Golding said. “It’s really healthy being in a bus league and eating at Ryan’s (Buffet) on Friday nights, (then to) be able to start (having) airplanes and full-service hotels.”
Golding may have had a humble rise, but since getting the job, he’s been anything but in the background. Clemson coach Dabo Swinney accused Golding of tampering in the transfer portal. Golding responded by pointing the finger at LSU for tampering with his players. He’s prone to going off script to speak his mind, such as a riff at SEC media days on the hypocrisy of some athletic directors.
Golding guided Ole Miss to the CFP semifinals in January, including a win over SEC champion Georgia. Time will tell if he can keep the program going long-term — including without Charlie Weis Jr., the offensive play caller who was with the team during the Playoff but then joined Kiffin at LSU.
But Golding’s personality, and the edge that comes from his small-school background, fits the program he now leads — one that knows it still needs to do a little more.
Ole Miss administrators approached Jones in spring 2022 about forming the Grove Collective. Name, image and likeness payments to players had recently become legal, and many schools ended up being slow to react. Ole Miss, however, sprang to action.
Carter, Jones and Ole Miss chancellor Glenn Boyce are all Ole Miss graduates. They had aspirations to use NIL and the transfer portal to raise Ole Miss athletics, especially football. The Grove Collective was one of the first and best in the space, investing more than $10 million into a 2024 roster that fell short of the Playoff.
“We kind of asked for forgiveness, not permission; did things that other schools were like, ‘How did you do that? Why did you do that?’” Jones said. “I talked to (Carter) every day. That was when it was taboo for collectives and the schools to talk. We just went the other direction.”
Kiffin was involved but not the driving force, according to Jones. He wasn’t the closer with donors, wasn’t regularly golfing with donors. For all his public perception — the news conference quotes, the social media antics — Kiffin is more of an introvert, according to those who knew him at Ole Miss. Jones found that putting Kiffin in a room with donors to talk about the team was the best use of their coach’s time. But the fundraising strategy was not built around Kiffin.
Partly because they knew they might not keep him forever.
“We probably deep down knew it was going to end that way too, the way it did. Just knowing the past,” Jones said.
“But that also motivated us to say this is bigger than one person. We feel like we’ve got as good alignment as anybody in the country. And we feel like we have maybe not the biggest fan base in the whole world, but a very rabid and passionate fan base, that we can get everyone going in the same direction.”
Lane Kiffin left Ole Miss for LSU two days after defeating rival Mississippi State in the Egg Bowl to secure a CFP bid. (Christian Petersen / Getty Images)
The collective differentiated Ole Miss for the first couple of years. Then others caught up, and they switched up again. The Grove Collective moved to a membership model, and created its own marketing agency, in the same way many schools started using their multimedia rights partners as third-party NIL sources.
Kiffin used it to stock the roster, most famously through the portal. The 2024 team set a program record with eight NFL draft picks, including four in the first two rounds. The 2025 team went 11-1 before Kiffin’s departure, then 2-1 under Golding.
“This is probably the best Ole Miss football has ever been,” said defensive tackle Will Echols, a Mississippi native.
Quarterback Trinidad Chambliss, whose first name led to Trinidad and Tobago flags being flown at games last year, said he ran into someone this offseason from that country who told him Ole Miss “has kind of taken over” the two-island nation.
“It’s so cool that Ole Miss is now global,” Chambliss said.
Kiffin helped get it there. The question now: Can the Rebels stay there — and show up their old coach in the process?
The SEC schedule-makers know what they’re doing: LSU comes to Oxford on Sept. 19, the third week of the season. Ole Miss linebacker Kam Franklin said he hears from fans “all the time” about the game.
“I tell them we got them,” Franklin said, adding, “Let us beat Louisville first. Let us win our first two games.”
That will be quite a few days in town: Ella Langley, the country music star, has a concert in town on Thursday. Logistically, people in town and at the school are preparing. But Ole Miss people are trying not to put too much into it.
Ole Miss fans fill “The Grove” for every home game — but Sept. 17 against LSU will be a bit bigger. (Streeter Lecka / Getty Images)
So far, they feel they’ve come through the Kiffin saga in a good place. There was annoyance at Saban, Kirk Herbstreit and others for arguing Ole Miss should let Kiffin coach in the CFP, but Carter took a stand, and the team validated the stand.
“We didn’t think about, ‘Oh, this is maybe our only one shot,’” Carter said. “Our goal has been working up to this point, and we don’t want to look back, and we don’t want to go back to the ways of the past. We want to be in the Playoff conversation every single year.”
This year’s team came in ranked No. 9 in the preseason Associated Press Top 25. The Rebels retained 90 percent of their eligible players from last year’s team, despite the departure of Kiffin, though they did lose four players to Kiffin’s Tigers. (Two LSU players transferred to Ole Miss.) Echols, Franklin, LB Suntarine Perkins, defensive tackle Jehiem Oatis and cornerback Cedrick Beavers are all Mississippi-born key players.
“When he left, it put us to a test. And for this year too,” defensive tackle Jam Brown said. “How do we want to be remembered? … I feel like it is a chip on our shoulder, because people don’t expect us to be anything.”
Ole Miss football has never won a consensus national championship, though it was the SEC’s dominant team from 1954 to 1963. The next 58 years saw only three 10-win seasons, in 1971, 2003 and 2015.
Then Kiffin arrived in 2020, and the team won at least 10 games in four of the past five seasons.
Maybe it was Kiffin. Or maybe, people at the school prefer to think, Kiffin plus the response to the NIL era. “Embracing the chaos,” Jones put it.
But Kiffin is gone, and that makes this a key moment.
“We feel like we have a seat at the table now,” Carter said. “You go around the country and wear the Ole Miss logo; people know who we are now. We’re not just a state or regional school now. We’re more of a national brand. But we’re by no means a blue blood yet. But our hope is we can look back in 10 or 15 years and say we not only had success in pockets, but we were able to sustain that, and now we are in that conversation with the top brands.”