09/20/2026
Lane Kiffin left Ole Miss for LSU and a reported $91 million.
Tonight he came back to Oxford.
And the man who replaced him beat him 32-24.
Almost nobody knows who Pete Golding is. Here is where he comes from.
Golding played safety at Delta State, a Division II school in Cleveland, Mississippi. He was All-Gulf South Conference in 2004 after putting up 85 tackles.
Not Alabama. Not LSU. Delta State.
When he was done playing he stayed there as a graduate assistant in 2006. Then he left to be the defensive coordinator at Tusculum College, a Division II school in Tennessee, for two years.
Tusculum College. That is the job.
He went back to Delta State in 2010 and they went to the Division II national championship game.
Then Southeastern Louisiana, where in 2013 his defense helped the Lions win 11 games and their first conference title since 1961.
Then Southern Miss, where by 2015 they were 9-5 and in a bowl game.
Then UTSA, where in 2017 his defense finished seventh in the entire country in total yards allowed.
Seventh. At UTSA.
That is when the phone rang, and it was Nick Saban.
Alabama hired Golding in December 2017. They made him defensive coordinator in 2019 and it did not go well that first year. People wanted him gone.
He stayed, he fixed it, and he was on the staff when Alabama won the national championship in 2020.
In January 2023 he came to Ole Miss as Lane Kiffin's defensive coordinator.
And then came last November.
Kiffin left for Baton Rouge. Six seasons in Oxford, gone, in the middle of the best season the program had ever had.
On November 30, 2025, Ole Miss handed the entire program to Pete Golding.
In the middle of a College Football Playoff run.
Understand what that actually is. A team is about to play for a national championship, the head coach walks out the door, and the school turns to the defensive coordinator and says here, it is yours now, there are three weeks until the playoff.
Most people would have held the thing together and called it a success.
Golding went 4-1.
He beat Tulane. He beat Georgia.
And Ole Miss lost to Miami in the College Football Playoff semifinal, one game from playing for the national title, with a head coach who had been on the job for a matter of weeks.
Which brings us to tonight.
Kiffin came back to Oxford on the other sideline, with the $91 million contract, in front of the stadium where he spent six years.
Ole Miss won 32-24.
Here is why this is worth reading.
The story everybody wanted to tell this week was about Lane Kiffin. What he said, how he was received, whether people booed.
But the more interesting man in that stadium was the one on the home sideline, and hardly anyone outside Mississippi could have picked him out of a lineup a year ago.
A Division II safety. A defensive coordinator at Tusculum College. A guy who got roasted in his first year calling Alabama's defense and stuck it out.
He did not get handed a program. He got handed a crisis, three weeks before the biggest games in school history.
He took it to the semifinals.
And tonight, the first time he got to stand across the field from the man who left, he won.
For more stories like this, follow us on any platform The Sports on Tap
