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By Rowan Fisher-Shotton
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Lane Kiffin returns to Oxford, Mississippi, on Saturday night for a high-profile clash between two SEC rivals, two top-10 teams, and the team Kiffin formerly coached before abruptly leaving to take another job across the country. No. 8 Ole Miss and No. 7 LSU will battle it out under the bright lights of Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in what's expected to be a hostile environment.
On Friday, Rebels head coach Pete Golding, who took over for Kiffin after he left for LSU last year, joined "The Pat McAfee Show" and addressed where his relationship with Kiffin stands now.
"I really appreciate how he [Kiffin] treated me and my family throughout the process. We became really good friends. There's things professionally, in every profession, that you don't respect, and probably the same thing that he doesn't about me at times. But I don't hide it from him. I'll call him and tell him," Golding said. "It ain't no beef between us that everybody tries to make. Everybody's got business decisions every January. Coaches do, players do, in the business we're in. And they're going to do what's best for them and their family. I ain't got to agree with it, and I ain't got to disagree with it. I ain't here to judge him. I wouldn't be standing in front of you without him."
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Golding, 42, has been climbing the coaching ladder for years. He started in 2006 as a graduate assistant at his alma mater, Delta State, a Division II school in Cleveland, Mississippi, before working as a defensive coordinator at Tusculum, Delta State, and Southeastern Louisiana; a defensive backs coach at Southern Miss; and a defensive coordinator at UTSA, Alabama, and then Ole Miss.
He spent five years working under Nick Saban at Alabama, first as a defensive assistant, then as co-defensive coordinator and linebackers coach, winning a national championship with the Tide in 2020. A legal incident ended his tenure in Tuscaloosa before he joined the Ole Miss staff under Kiffin in 2023.
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When Kiffin took the LSU job, Golding took over as head coach and led the Rebels through the College Football Playoff, guiding them to wins over Tulane and Georgia before a narrow loss to runner-up Miami. Golding has already impressed in his brief time as head coach, and now he gets his chance to prove that Ole Miss was right to stay committed to him, and that Kiffin was wrong to leave in the first place.
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