The Athletic’s Stewart Mandel and Bruce Feldman released their annual top 25 college football coaches rankings Thursday morning, the latest installment of the offseason content machine.
Mandel and Feldman aren’t typically known as hot take artists, but given how the 2025 season played out, it’s difficult to even define what the chalk rankings are, which made this year’s list particularly interesting.
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But it was hard to find something more curious than where the latter ranked LSU’s new head coach, Lane Kiffin. Mandel was fairly high on the Tigers’ head man, ranking him eighth, just behind Notre Dame’s Marcus Freeman and Texas’ Steve Sarkisian. Feldman’s ranking, on the other hand, came as a real shock. He placed Kiffin 15th, right behind recently-fired Penn State head coach James Franklin, who has since taken over at Virginia Tech.
Dec 1, 2025; Baton Rouge, LA, USA; LSU new head coach Lane Kiffin speaks at South Stadium Club at Tiger Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Matthew Hinton-Imagn Images
This ranking becomes even more mystifying when you read what appears to be Feldman’s explanation for why he’s so low on the Tigers’ head coach:
“Overall, [Kiffin is] 6-16 all-time against top-10 opponents and 14-25 vs. Top 25 opponents,” Feldman wrote.
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To be fair, it’s true that Kiffin doesn’t have the strongest track record against the top teams in the country. But can you really say Franklin did a much better job than Kiffin during his time at Penn State?
Franklin vs. Kiffin
The Athletic gave the Penn State job an “A” grade in an article that ranked the open head coaching positions back in December, citing the Nittany Lions’ tradition, money, and facilities as reasons why it’s considered one of the top jobs in college football.
Further, The Athletic’s program valuation for Penn State was $1.2 billion before the 2025 season began, placing them 11th among Power Four programs at that time. Ole Miss’ valuation was less than half that, at $591 million, which ranked 25th.
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So, with that difference in infrastructure, you’d think Feldman ranked Franklin higher than Kiffin simply because the former won more big games, right? Wrong. Franklin was 4-21 against AP top-10 opponents during his tenure at Penn State, which comes out to a .160 winning percentage. Sure, Kiffin’s win percentage against top-10 opponents (.375) isn’t spectacular, but it’s certainly far better than Franklin’s.
For clarity, that top-10 win percentage is .375 over Kiffin’s entire head coaching tenure, but focusing solely on his accomplishments at Ole Miss alone, that number improves drastically. From 2020 until Kiffin left Ole Miss in November 2025, he went 5-7 against top-10 opponents, and since Kiffin truly got the Rebels back on track in 2022, his record against top-10 teams is 4-3.
So, has Kiffin earned the reputation to be considered a top-five head coach in the sport? No. But it’s hard to argue why he should be ranked below James Franklin, considering how Kiffin revitalized an Ole Miss program that had only reached 10 wins twice in the two decades before Kiffin arrived in Oxford.
Kiffin has a lot to prove in Baton Rouge, but if he can meet the sky-high expectations fans have for him, don’t be surprised to see him crack the top five on Feldman’s list this time next year.
This article originally appeared on LSU Wire: Where LSU’s Lane Kiffin lands on The Athletic’s head coach rankings
