OXFORD, Miss. — Pete Golding was hours away from landing his first head coaching job, and he was still trying to talk his way out of it.

Inside Ole Miss’ football facility, Golding huddled with Lane Kiffin deep into the night — Golding felt certain he could convince his boss to stay. They had something special, Golding said, like those Clemson teams of the 2010s — a dynamic coach and two coordinators happy in their roles. They had caught lightning in a bottle, and now Kiffin, enamored with the LSU job, wanted to blow it all up.

Be careful what you wish for, Golding told him.

“I was telling him, ‘You’re a f—ing idiot if you leave,'” Golding said. “I thought I could convince him to stay. And then it got real.”

Golding had worked his way up from Division II to be the defensive coordinator at Alabama. He left the Tide following the 2022 season, jumping ship to start a life in Oxford with an Ole Miss team that had just lost five of its past six games. Nick Saban was livid, and Golding said he didn’t speak to him again for a year and a half. But what Golding saw in Ole Miss wasn’t about football. It was family. He had kids, and he didn’t want to move them from place to place as he chased the next big job. In Oxford, he saw a forever home.

Now, here was Kiffin, on the brink of foreclosing on the dream.

While Kiffin hemmed and hawed over his decision, athletic director Keith Carter had been running a coaching search in tandem, ready to move quickly should Kiffin leave. Carter had interviewed a handful of solid candidates — “guys who got big-time jobs this cycle,” he said — but it seemed impossible anyone could arrive from the outside and keep order amid a likely chaotic Kiffin exit.

Golding wasn’t lobbying for the job initially, but as the clock ticked on Kiffin’s departure, it occurred to him just how bad things could go if someone else took over.

“It’s one thing to work for Nick Saban or Lane Kiffin,” Golding said. “But are you going to be OK with so-and-so coming in here and doing it another way? It wasn’t until I thought about that, it really hit me that we better go get this thing.”

So Golding walked into Carter’s office and made a declaration: “I want this.”

Kiffin made his departure official Nov. 30, and Ole Miss quickly turned the page, announcing Golding would be his replacement.

The offensive staff was in flux, working part time for LSU and part time for Ole Miss. The portal was set to open, and the players Golding was gearing up for a playoff run were fielding calls from agents detailing hefty offers to follow Kiffin. The fan base was enraged, a media circus engulfed the team and a recruiting class teetered on the brink of disaster.

Then Ole Miss won.

The Rebels beat Tulane in the first round of the College Football Playoff, then stunned Georgia in the Allstate Sugar Bowl before falling one play short of beating Miami to advance to the national championship game. Golding had two CFP wins under his belt before he ever coached a regular-season game.

Now, as the Rebels open the 2026 season against Louisville (7:30 p.m. ET, ABC), Golding is ready to officially begin his tenure in Oxford. Two playoff wins offered evidence that this can work, that the program is bigger than its former coach, but there’s a long way to go before the Rebels can fully distance themselves from the past. What’s clear though is that as Ole Miss embarks on this new era, both Golding and Rebels fans are eager to see him make it his own.

“We’ll see how his career plays out,” Carter said, “but as far as winning the fan base — he just fits. I’ve heard over and over again how excited they are that he’s our guy.”

GOLDING IS LIVING in Kiffin’s house.

This is not a metaphor for inheriting a program Kiffin built. No, Golding is literally living in Kiffin’s old house in Oxford.

“And he hasn’t even sent me my furniture yet,” Kiffin said.

A day after Kiffin left for LSU, Golding asked if he could use the place, and Kiffin ended up giving him a good deal to buy it. But it came with a catch.

“I have cameras, so I could see him,” Kiffin said. “People would be like, ‘Oh, he’s coming to try to recruit this player here or this portal guy there, and I’m like, ‘He can’t be. I just saw him walk into the house.’ I told him afterward, ‘You might want to change out the Ring camera.'”

So, yes, Golding is aware of Kiffin’s watchful eye looming like Sauron.

Here’s the narrative Golding knows he can’t escape: Those two playoff wins last year technically belong to Golding, but it wasn’t really his team. If Ole Miss is good again this year, he’s doing it with Kiffin’s players. The buzz around the program has been all about the Week 3 matchup with LSU, because if there’s one thing that might matter more in Oxford than the Rebels returning to the playoff, it’s beating Kiffin.

Like it or not, Kiffin is the sun, and Ole Miss still exists in his orbit.

“There’s always going to be a piece for several years where — ‘Oh that player was there when Lane was there, that’s Lane’s player,'” Golding said. “If it works. If it doesn’t, then Pete can’t coach.”

It might seem reasonable then that Golding would be doing all he could to distance his program from the past, to draw clear lines between what Kiffin had built and the new regime in Oxford. That’s not how Golding operates, though.

“He is mature enough and humble enough to recognize the things Lane did that were successful,” said Walker Jones, director of the Grove Collective, Ole Miss’ NIL arm, “but he also knows he’s a different personality.”

While Golding wasn’t angling for this job, he said he has been preparing to be a head coach for most of his career. He has kept two notebooks, labeled “because of” and “in spite of.”

The “because of” notebook lists all the stuff he has seen coaches, including Saban and Kiffin, do right over the years. He doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel. Ole Miss had success doing it Kiffin’s way, and Golding isn’t looking to mess with a good thing. When it came time to fill out his offensive staff, he brought in John David Baker — a Kiffin protégé who was at Ole Miss from 2021 to ’23 — to call plays.

The “in spite of” notebook lists all the things Golding thought were useless or, in his parlance, “complete wastes of f—ing time” that, when he was in charge, he’d be all too happy to nix.

Consider, for example, Kiffin’s basketball hoop that was wheeled out to the sideline every game so players could celebrate after a touchdown or a takeaway by performing a dunk contest.

“We’re going to roll an ankle dunking a basketball on the sideline with one of our better players,” Golding said. “It looks cool, I get it — but the impact, to me it’s the, ‘Look at me, look at me,’ when my message is, when you make a good play, celebrate with your team.”

There are other changes to emerge from that “in spite of” notebook. Golding has spent more money on defense. He has enacted a more robust off-field program, including building out the school’s “Fourth Quarter” program aimed at developing physical and mental toughness, and character and career development programs.

On the field, Kiffin’s Ole Miss had been exceptional. Off it, Golding saw work to be done. This summer, Ole Miss launched a Heisman Trophy campaign to support Trinidad Chambliss and Kewan Lacy with billboards in Times Square and on the Sphere in Las Vegas.

The Heisman campaigns are something Carter said he wished Ole Miss had done a year ago, as Chambliss and Lacy blossomed into stars. Instead, the story was Kiffin. Always Kiffin.

“Lane is a figure that’s always going to garner attention,” Carter said. “It helped our program in a ton of ways, but it did take a lot of the focus off the players. Pete has been very intentional about putting it back on them.”

GOLDING HAS A succinct philosophy for what he’s looking for in the people who make up Ole Miss’ program under his stewardship: “Be a good dude.”

It’s a phrase he uses frequently and, admittedly, it’s a bit abstract. Yes, he said, he’d prefer if that “good” portion referred to the ability to play football, but it can’t stop there.

“I hate fake people,” Golding said. “And don’t lie to me. If I can’t trust you, we can’t have a relationship.”

It’s a nonnegotiable for him.

From Golding’s ruffled mop of salt-and-pepper hair to the wad of tobacco tucked behind his lip to the inevitable string of four-letter words that pepper nearly every sentence he utters, he is not putting on airs for anyone.

And Golding isn’t going to — his word — “bulls—” anyone, even if he’s at least aware enough of how his new job might require him to occasionally withhold a few details. Consider Clemson’s tampering allegations, suggesting — with a fair amount of receipts — that Golding pushed hard to lure linebacker Luke Ferrelli to Oxford after he had already enrolled in classes at Clemson. Golding hasn’t exactly admitted any role in Ferrelli’s recruitment, but he hasn’t denied it either. Instead, he has laid out his case for why the whole kerfuffle is overblown and suggested that, if the NCAA wants to start peeking into closets, it’s going to find a lot more skeletons than just his.

Or listen as he excoriates his coaching staff on the proper way to handle players.

“You’re not here to be their friend,” Golding said.

If a player stinks, tell him. Be honest. Then offer a plan to get him better.

“They’re going to respect it at the end of the day,” Golding said. “They might not right then, but they will. But if you bulls— and lie to them, they’re going to know.”

At a players meeting the day classes started, Golding issued an edict: Show up for class, pay attention, participate, no sitting in the back of the room with a hoodie pulled over their eyes. Twenty years from now, he told Lacy, no one’s going to care that Ole Miss made it to a playoff semifinal in 2025. They’ll care how Lacy made them feel, how he treated them. They’ll say, “Kewan Lacy’s a good dude.”

This might feel like the biggest divergence from the old guard. With Kiffin, there always appeared to be a veneer of inauthenticity, the critique leveled against him at nearly every stop of his career. Wasn’t Kiffin the very definition of, well, not a good dude?

“In a lot of things, he was,” Golding said. “And I told him that.”

If Kiffin knew football, though, he struggled with relationships and could be, Jones said, “a little touchy” about opening the doors to the program to too many outsiders. Golding has always worked from the other direction.

“It takes no ability to open a door for somebody and say thank you and do things the right way and then shut the f— up,” he said. “It got me far in life by being a good dude regardless of what I knew, how I spoke, what kind of defense I could draw up.”

Golding has welcomed former players. He has gone on golf trips with bigwigs. He has called donors on their birthday. Got some money to help the program? Come sit in on a few meetings too.

In his final years at Alabama, Golding saw firsthand the recalcitrance of the money men about ponying up cash to add talent. Hadn’t Saban won plenty without all that? Of course the game had changed, but Golding understood the issue. These were businesspeople used to seeing a return on investment. Now schools were asking them to open a checkbook and fork over serious money just for the hope they might be able to witness a few wins.

“I’ve always thought that the people who are invested in this program should get something that nobody else does,” Golding said, “and to me, that’s my time.”

Kiffin took the Ole Miss job, Golding said, because it was better than the job he had at the time, and it paid more money than he was making back then. And then another better job came along, and Kiffin left. That’s how these transactions work.

Golding says that’s not how he is going to operate. He wants relationships built on something deeper.

“Vulnerability is a real thing,” Golding said. “You naturally connect with people you share things with. Sharing things allows other people to open up, too. We’re all f—ed up. We all got issues.”

GOLDING INSISTS THAT Kiffin’s departure and the chaos that followed didn’t cost Ole Miss a shot at a national title, but it’s impossible to say Miami had his full attention. Hours after beating Georgia, he was immediately thrown into portal wildness. He didn’t watch a second of film on Miami until he boarded a plane to fly to Arizona for the game, he said.

“You’re having meetings with kids and their parents while practice is going on because of the timing. On top of trying to convince dudes on your current team to try to get ready for a semifinal game and stop talking to your agent about where you’re going to go,” Golding said. “And on top of that — ‘Hey Charlie [Weis Jr.], when are you going to come back [to call plays]?’ The combination of all that — that window — that was a f—ing disaster.”

And yet, look how close the Rebels still came to winning.

Golding doesn’t take solace in that though. He’s angry about it, and to stay angry, he has watched the tape of that Miami loss three times a week, every week since January.

“Then I just hate life for a couple hours,” he said.

This is another thing Golding learned from his time at Alabama. Saban’s genius wasn’t in building something great. It was in sustaining it, and staying at the top requires an unflinching ability to stay hungry.

Ole Miss had a dream season last year, but that’s not enough, Golding said. He wants more. This summer, in yet another of Kiffin’s ill-timed diatribes about his old employer, he said he felt compelled to take the LSU job because he didn’t want to work at a place that “will build a statue” of a coach who goes 7-5.

This is where Kiffin got it all wrong, Golding said. When the two were huddled in that office, Kiffin on the brink of leaving, Golding kept telling him this wasn’t the same Ole Miss anymore. Kiffin had built it into something so much bigger, and the new era of college football opened doors to so many more opportunities in Oxford.

Kiffin left anyway. Now it’s Golding’s chance to prove his old boss made the wrong choice.

“We genuinely feel in this new era we have a seat at the table with the big boys,” Carter said. “Pete embodies that. We have expectations, and it’s not 7-5, I promise you that.”

So the Miami tape plays again.

“I put on that last drive like — ‘All right, motherf‐‐‐er, don’t forget,'” Golding said.

Watch it again. Losing a playoff game cannot be the high-water mark at Ole Miss anymore.

“You can say it was a great year, but when you’re that close and you didn’t play well, and if you’d played well you could’ve played in the next one and then … who knows?” Golding said.

Who knows? That’s the whole point. Do this the right way and anything’s possible. Look how close the Rebels came even while the walls were crumbling down around them. Play the tape again.

“You can’t lose that feeling,” Golding said. “F— that. You need to feel that every morning when you get up. And are you doing what it takes to not feel that again?”

Golding doesn’t want to lose that feeling, because there is no next job. He’s here. He’s in it — not for the money or the prestige. His youngest is 8, and he said he’s not leaving town until she is done with high school. He’d like to still be working when that happens.

That’s not happening if he’s 7-5.

Kiffin raised the bar in Oxford. Golding’s job now isn’t to invent something new, but to build on what he inherited.

Is this still Kiffin’s team? Is it Golding’s?

The answer, Golding said, is neither. Ole Miss is bigger than either of them, bigger than Carter, Chambliss, Lacy or anyone else who might eventually leave Oxford.

But everyone gets their chance to put their own mark on the program, and Golding wants to be clear: This isn’t going to be some pale imitation of what came before.

“I really appreciate how [Kiffin] treated me and my family and the opportunity he created for us,” Golding said. “I thought we did a lot of really good things. I love Kiff. But are we the same dude? No. Am I trying to mimic my career after him? No.”