MAKING THE ROUNDS at SEC media days in July, Lane Kiffin patted his jacket pocket and joked that, inside, there was a card on which he had written a reminder to himself: "Be boring."Or, maybe it wasn't a joke. With Kiffin, it's hard to tell. Everything he says or posts online tends to come with a wink, a smirk and the historical context that implies he might be full of it. Regardless, being boring was an impossible goal for a coach whose career in the public eye suggests he's incapable of keeping his hand out of the cookie jar.

His willingness to say whatever is on his mind and do whatever it takes to get ahead has made him, at varying times, the sport's most renowned social media troll, most necessary truth-teller and most reviled villain. Take, for example, Kiffin's departure from Ole Miss ahead of last season's College Football Playoff, a timeline he said was necessitated by the sport's ill-fitting calendar. Or consider Kiffin's comments to Vanity Fair this spring when he said recruits sometimes shunned Ole Miss because of its history of racial segregation, a problem he didn't have at LSU.

In more delicate hands, such commentary might have been the start of meaningful discussions on the ineptitude of NCAA governance or the ways the history of race still resonates in the South. In Kiffin's hands, however, it was the type of incendiary rhetoric for which he has long cornered the market. "I made a challenging decision and changed," Kiffin said. "And I thought I could make everyone understand."

Booger McFarland, an ESPN analyst and LSU alum, said, "Lane has been very open, and if everyone would just listen to what he says, he tells you everything." Kiffin chose LSU as the path of least resistance to win a national title. "I've built my life about pushing out of comfort," Kiffin said. "Everyone talks about the pressure of LSU and what comes with that. I enjoyed it."