Every college football fan across the country had their eyes set on one matchup this season: LSU vs. Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi. Not because it was a clash between two SEC heavyweights, or what turned out to be a matchup between two top-10 teams three weeks in, but because it was Lane Kiffin's highly anticipated return to face his former team.
The result couldn't have gone worse for Kiffin. LSU trailed all game, and when it finally started to get close in the fourth quarter, Trinidad Chambliss put the Rebels ahead with a late rushing score, and Sam Leavitt threw an interception to end any chance of a comeback. The Tigers flew back to Baton Rouge with a 34-24 loss and their first defeat of the 2026 season.
What's worse for Kiffin isn't just that more than 70,000 raucous fans in Vaught-Hemingway Stadium relentlessly booed him upon his return, but that more than 10 million people tuned in on TV to watch it happen. The official numbers from the high-profile matchup dropped Tuesday, and they revealed massive ratings. An average of 10.9 million viewers watched the game, with viewership peaking at 13.7 million.
That makes it the eighth most-watched game in the last decade and the second-most-watched game of the 2026 season, trailing only Texas' dramatic comeback win over Ohio State in Week 2, which drew 14 million viewers. More news: Oregon’s Dante Moore Loses Key Weapon Ahead of Big USC Clash More news: Deion Sanders Fuming Over Colorado Player’s Behavior After Loss to Northwestern Kiffin's week just keeps getting worse. The loss itself was bad enough.
He fell to the same team he chose to leave because he believed LSU was the better program. Analysts have been hounding him all week, both for the loss and for his original decision to leave Ole Miss in the first place. And now there's no hiding that everybody watched it happen.
LSU's odds of making the College Football Playoff have plummeted with the loss as well. The Tigers face a brutal upcoming schedule that includes ranked matchups against No. 23 Texas A&M, No. 24 Mississippi State, No. 8 Alabama, No. 1 Texas, and No. 14 Tennessee. If Kiffin can't even make the CFP in his first year at LSU, let alone compete for a national championship, things will only get worse for him.
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