Behind the scenes of Lane Kiffin’s wild return to Tennessee

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Lane Kiffin stood outside the visitors locker room at Neyland Stadium in the wee hours of Sunday morning proudly twirling a beaten-up yellow range ball and searching for a new visor.

He’d just tossed his old visor to the jeering Tennessee fans as he exited a field littered with water bottles, vape pipes, screws, a half-eaten apple, even an empty mustard bottle. He kept the golf ball as a souvenir but felt as if he owed the Vols’ fans their own keepsake.

“The Tennessee fans there at the tunnel were all going, ‘F— you. F— you,’ so I throw them my visor … and they all start fighting over it,” Kiffin told ESPN. “Maybe all of them don’t hate me.”

Lane Kiffin caught a water bottle on his way out of Neyland Stadium – and tossed his visor back 😅 pic.twitter.com/KVxZiPK7ZB

— ESPN (@espn) October 17, 2021

Maybe not, but what’s not debatable — in the aftermath of one of the wildest and ugliest scenes in recent college football history Saturday in Ole Miss’ 31-26 victory over Tennessee — is that when Kiffin exits Knoxville as a head coach, all hell is sure to break loose.

“Just when you thought everyone had moved on and made up,” Kiffin said jokingly. “Nothing ever goes normal. Welcome to my world. And we all thought it was crazy when I left here 12 years ago.”

In January 2010, when Kiffin bolted Tennessee after just one season for the USC head-coaching job, drunken students were running amok on campus and burning mattresses as the news broke. Even an impromptu news conference that Kiffin called to explain to fans why he was leaving erupted into chaos, with media members screaming at each other and fighting over what portion of Kiffin’s comments would be on camera as he waited in an adjacent hallway.

Then on Saturday, with Kiffin back on Rocky Top for the first time as a head coach, fans peppered the Ole Miss sideline with debris of every kind after a controversial spot on a fourth-down play by the Vols that came up just short of the first-down…