A Rogue in the Grove Lane Kiffin’s High-Stakes Oxford Encore

Two games. Two wins. A Top-10 ranking.

LSU has checked every box it could through the first two weeks of the Lane Kiffin era.

Ole Miss has done the same.

Thats nice. Now comes the fun part.

Kiffin's Return to Oxford Will Be A Show

LSU Holds trophy — Oct 21, 2017; Oxford, MS, USA; LSU Tigers players react with the Magnolia Bowl Trophy after a game against the Mississippi Rebels at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Matt Bush-USA TODAY Sports | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

For almost 8 months, the Tigers heard about their potential, they heard the noise, and over the past two weeks, they have seemed to live up to expectations.

The defense looks legitimate. Lane Kiffin's offense continues to settle in, and LSU walked out of Tiger Stadium two Saturdays in a row undefeated and with another reason to believe this team might be exactly what it thinks it is.

The Rebels can say plenty of the same things.

Ole Miss is 2-0 and ranked inside the Top 10.

They're coming off a 13-win season, have one of the country's most dangerous quarterbacks in Trinidad Chambliss, and haven't exactly fallen apart since Kiffin packed his bags for Baton Rouge.

LSU thinks it's good. Ole Miss thinks it's good. The polls think both are good.

Saturday night, somebody gets to prove it.

And for all the attention surrounding Kiffin's return, Pete Golding doesn't seem particularly interested in turning Saturday into anything more than a football game, either.

“Obviously, the former players and all the former coaches and relationships you've had, that's not unique to one game anymore,” Golding said Monday.

Maybe that's easier said than done.

College GameDay will be in Oxford. Vaught-Hemingway will be packed. Kiffin already knows what kind of reception is waiting for him when he walks onto a field he called home less than a year ago.

But eventually, somebody has to kick the ball off.

And when they do, all the other stuff becomes considerably less important.

LSU is 2-0. Ole Miss is 2-0. The Tigers are No. 7. The Rebels are No. 8. It's the first Top-10 meeting between the programs since 1962.

The Magnolia Bowl was always going to carry a little more weight this season. Kiffin returning to Oxford made sure of that long before either team played its first snap.

There will be boo's. There will be signs. There will probably be a few things yelled from the stands that can't be printed here.

Kiffin knows it too. During his Monday press conference, he said to the media that he told his players, “There’s going to be so much attention, hatred, and everything on me... You just get to go play.”

That's about as simple as LSU can make it.

Kiffin spent six seasons building Ole Miss into the program LSU will walk into Vaught-Hemingway Stadium and face Saturday night. Pete Golding inherited it and has kept it rolling.

Now Kiffin comes back wearing purple and gold with a team trying to establish itself as a legitimate national contender.

There isn't much left to talk about.

Kiffin called the situation “unusual.” Of course it is. Coaches aren't usually asked to beat a Top-10 program they helped construct less than a year after leaving it.

But once the ball is kicked off, none of that matters much.

Kiffin quipped that 'he's not going to make a tackle and that [Pete] won't catch a pass.' Whatever happened between Kiffin, Ole Miss, and LSU over the last year isn't going to move the chains Saturday night.

The players will.

Two undefeated teams. Two Top-10 teams. Two programs that believe they're capable of playing for something much bigger later this season.

Both have spent the first two weeks looking like teams capable of making some noise in the SEC. Both have plenty of reasons to believe they're as good as advertised.

Great.

Now one of them has to be better than the other.

Kiffin can call the pressure Ole Miss' problem. Golding can tell his team to ignore everything happening outside the building. For the next five days, everybody gets to talk.

One of them gets to leave Oxford still believing it.

The other gets its first dose of reality.

Enough talking about how good these teams might be.

Saturday night, we find out.

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