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By Cameron Kiszla
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Perhaps no coach's time at SEC Media Days was as anticipated as that of LSU Tigers head coach Lane Kiffin.
Months after he jumped ship from Ole Miss ahead of the College Football Playoff, many were excited to hear what he would have to say about his tumultuous offseason.
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Unfortunately for them, Kiffin apparently came in with a strategy to limit his exposure to tough questions, a plan straight out of the Washington, D.C., playbook.
Kiffin's Epic Opening Statement
Presented with a 30-minute window, Kiffin used more than half of it — 16 minutes — on his opening statement, leaving time for only four questions, which David Cobb of CBS Sports compared to a filibuster, the famous tactic often used in Congress to prevent a vote on a bill.
"When he took the stage for the first time as LSU's coach on Thursday, he prattled on for over 16 minutes, issuing a winding opening filibuster," Cobb wrote. "If the goal was to stave off potentially thorny inquiries from the assembled media about his whirlwind departure from Ole Miss, it worked.
"Kiffin lauded commissioner Greg Sankey, touched on his love for the SEC Media Days host city of Tampa and talked up the positives of his recent social media hiatus. His Week 3 return to Vaught-Hemingway Stadium to face his former program went unaddressed during the nationally televised portion of his time at SEC Media Days."
Cobb added on social media that Kiffin's lengthy monologue is far from the norm for him or for SEC coaches.
While he was the Rebels' head coach, Kiffin average opening statement was 5:32.
And this year, other SEC coaches typically spoke for about seven to nine minutes, and Kiffin's speech was nearly two minutes longer than the next-closest speech, with his 16:23 far beyond South Carolina's Shane Beamer, who spoke for 14:40.
Was Kiffin simply trying to avoid making more headlines after a thrashing in the press over the past few months? It's hard to say for sure, but when questioned about one offseason controversy, he offered a wide-ranging answer, Cobb reports.
"Kiffin went off the rails in his response, speaking of his childhood admiration for his father and Hulk Hogan. At one point, he observed that, 'we're all going to die,'" Cobb wrote.
With answers like that, it certainly seems that time was a consideration for the first-year Tigers coach.
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