10 years after USC fired him on the tarmac, Lane Kiffin believes he can weather any storm

OXFORD, Miss. — The first meeting of the summer session for the Mississippi coaching staff doesn’t start with football. Before they step into their roles as coordinators or assistants on this Wednesday morning in June, Lane Kiffin wants them to be fathers and husbands.

As they walk into the conference room, tall coffees in hand, the conversation revolves around their kids’ baseball games. Kiffin enters, followed by his young British lab, Juice, and quietly takes his seat.

Soon, a staff member guides Juice away, and the door closes. The meeting begins with a prayer.

“We’re going to talk about temptation,” says Fish Robinson, Kiffin’s pastor and a friend of the program. “I just pray we’ll be honest and real about where we’re at.”

A young man named Jared Farlow sits at the head of the table to lead today’s coaches devotion. He describes temptation as a “crack in the foundation that the enemy uses to make war with us, to get us off path.”

“Why is laying a strong foundation so important?” Farlow asks.

There’s a bit of silence, but Kiffin won’t allow it to get awkward.

“The house analogy of … get the foundation right, take your time, then the storms come, and issues come, you’ll have a chance,” Kiffin says in a low mumble.

Kiffin, 48, can speak with authority on this one. When the biggest storm of his life came out of nowhere 10 years ago, he had nothing firm to fall back on. “The Tarmac” remains an oft-used punchline for college football fans today, but for Kiffin, his 4 a.m. firing on the tarmac at LAX by USC athletic director Pat Haden was more than a public humiliation. It was acute trauma, shattering his self-image.

“Like Coach is saying about the house, you can build a massive, beautiful structure,” Robinson says, “but if the foundation is not healthy, it will crumble.”

Three months after this pensive moment with his staff, Kiffin’s freshly laid foundation is being tested. A storm of his own making is gathering, in the form of a lawsuit filed against Kiffin and Ole Miss by Rebels defensive tackle DeSanto Rollins. The suit alleges that Kiffin kicked Rollins off the team last spring for missing practices and refused to meet with him during what Rollins says was a mental-health crisis.

Rollins alleges that the Ole Miss staff did not supply him with mental-health materials after he became depressed dealing with injuries that kept him off the field last season. The lawsuit highlights a conversation Rollins legally recorded without Kiffin’s knowledge in March that paints a picture of a coach who had run out of patience for a player who could not function for the team amid his personal struggles.

Ole Miss released a statement to reporters Thursday night saying it had not received the lawsuit and declined to comment other than to say Rollins remains on scholarship and continues to have access to all sources available to Ole Miss athletes. Kiffin declined to comment, deferring to the statement.

But on this day,