Lane Kiffin has had the college football world on the edge of its seat for years. The latest drama unfolds this weekend

ESPN analyst Paul Finebaum once compared him to Miley Cyrus and the late Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis called him a “flat-out liar.’’

Tennessee students torched T-shirts and mattresses after he left for USC.

Three years later, clever USC students graffitied the word “Kiffin” beneath every no parking “Fire Lane” marking on campus. Five games into the 2013 season, the school’s athletic director obliged, firing Lane Kiffin at 3 a.m. in the infamous dismissal known as the “tarmac firing.”

And now here we are, a dozen years later, and three SEC schools with claims to 10 national championships among them all are anxiously awaiting to learn which of them will earn the right to pay Kiffin an obscene amount of money to coach its football team.

Forget turkey and stuffing, you can’t get more Americana than this – an improbable, if not exactly plucky, comeback story mixed into a reality show starring a savvy social-media-influencing family, playing out like an old-fashioned “Sophie’s Choice” soap opera and all of it neatly wrapped up in the purely American pastime of the pigskin.

Not since a local TV station trained a camera on the back door of John Calipari’s Memphis office, trying to see if the coach was literally leaving for Kentucky, has a coach inspired such melodrama.

WWLD (What will Lane do)? Will he choose desperate LSU, whose governor reportedly has endorsed multi-million-dollar investments in both Kiffin’s contract and the Tigers’ NIL? Does it matter that his son, Knox, wore LSU headphones to his high school playoff football game and that his daughter, Landry, dates an LSU linebacker?

Or will he opt for Florida, which is seeking its eighth (if you count the two-game careers each for DJ Durkin and Greg Knox) coach in the last 15 years in its unrequited effort to rekindle the Urban Meyer years? Kiffin’s now-reunited wife, Layla, went to school there. Will that give Gainesville the relocation package edge?

Or will he stay put at Ole Miss, where he has led the Rebels to their best season in more than six decades? Or will Ole Miss get jilted, bailed on before their savior coach can take them to the College Football Playoff altar?

The Decision (apologies to LeBron James) is expected to come on Saturday, after Ole Miss either secures its spot in the playoff or gets egg all over its face and loses the Egg Bowl to Mississippi State. How the decision will be shared – news conference, press release, Instagram reel of a papal-like puff of smoke in branded school colors spewing from the chimney of the Kiffin family manse – remains to be seen.

Yet What Lane Will (Actually) Do is almost secondary to the tempest he’s created to get here. He is the perfect coach for this moment of college athletics excess and absurdity, inexplicably the most desirable coach in all of college football despite a career pockmarked by epic failures.

And rather than act as the Serious-Minded Football Coach and Leader of Men who would never do anything to distract from the very serious business of football, Kiffin is leaning into the mayhem, as if he’s in on the joke.

The Serious-Minded Coach would hide behind the cloak of plausible deniability and let his agent do the dirty work before skulking out of town to his next gig. Kiffin? He’s posting pictures of meditative readings to his X account: “Day 228 how do you figure out what you really want?” reads the start of one passage of a book he has open.

If you are not in the throes of the hysteria, this is, in fact, quite hysterical.

Consider the career arc of Lane Monte Kiffin, son of esteemed and very serious-minded defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin. His father was considered one of the game’s best defensive minds. He got his first shot at a head-coaching gig at NC State. After three seasons with no bowl games, he was fired and never got another head job.

His son? No one, it seems, can avoid the lure of Lane.

Davis fell under his spell first. The colorful Raiders owner tabbed the then-31-year-old Kiffin as the Raiders head coach in 2007, reminding everyone that the brilliant John Madden – who led the franchise to the Super Bowl XI title – was only 32 when he started in Oakland (Davis was just 33 when he coached the team in 1963).

“We will come back. And Lane Kiffin will lead us back,’’ Davis vowed.

Twenty games later, Davis got out an overhead projector in order to specify exactly how Kiffin had failed him, concluding, “I think he conned me like he conned all you people,’’ he said.

Despite being dismissed in that blaze of unglory on September 30, 2008, Kiffin had another head coaching job and a raise within two months. The University of Tennessee hired him to replace Phil Fulmer, at $2.375 million a year, a bump from the $2 million Davis paid him.

“We’ll eventually win a lot here,’’ Kiffin promised, “but I can’t tell you when that will be.’’

Eventually never happened. Kiffin stiff-armed the Volunteers 14 months later, having won as many games (seven) as recruiting violations incurred. Angry students torched mattresses and tried to bumrush the room where Kiffin read a statement about his decision to leave. Campus police drove him home in a cruiser for protection.

Asked to describe Kiffin’s tenure, athletic director Mike Hamilton said: “Brief.’’

Kiffin took over a USC team under serious NCAA penalties and within two seasons led the Trojans to a 10-2 record. The next season, USC debuted at No. 1 in the nation. The Trojans finished 7-6 and, five games into the 2013 season, Kiffin’s athletic director met him after a dismal 62-41 loss to Arizona and handed Kiffin his pink slip. Kiffin has since said he wasn’t actually left on the tarmac all those years ago – as it was portrayed back then and stuck in college football lore since – but he was indeed fired at the airport in the overnight hours.

All of which prompted Finebaum to opine on SportsCenter, “How did someone like Lane Kiffin ever get these jobs? In some respects, Lane Kiffin is the Miley Cyrus of college football. He has very little talent, but we simply can’t take our eyes off him.’’

The Icarus of college football, Kiffin crash-landed at Alabama, hired by Nick Saban as his offensive coordinator. It was the equivalent of a pigskin cleansing.

Given the reins of Saban’s thoroughbred, Kiffin won a national title, championed a Heisman Trophy winner (Derrick Henry) and drove his boss crazy at times with his playcalling. Saban is the Exhibit A of a Serious-Minded Football Coach and he and his OC did not always see eye to eye.

Saban memorably chewed out Kiffin in a game against Western Kentucky, explaining later, “There are no arguments. Those are called ass-chewings.’’

Given a reboot to his head-coaching career, Kiffin grabbed it, accepting a job at Florida Atlantic. Though he vowed to finish the season in Tuscaloosa, where the Tide was playing in the national championship, he was given the “don’t let the door hit you” from Saban.

Worried about his coordinator paying more attention to his new job than his old one, Saban tabbed Steve Sarkisian his new offensive assistant a week before the title game, and Kiffin left for the state of Florida.

After three successful and largely mundane years at Florida Atlantic, Kiffin arrived in Oxford, where the football team could never quite match the fandom’s fervor.

And finally, Kiffin did it. He delivered.

The Rebels are in the middle of a historic season – ranked seventh in the nation, with only that game against Mississippi State standing between them and postseason glory.

This should be his moment. He should be like Miley Cyrus: dancing and strutting off stage with a Grammy hoisted above her head.

Instead Bet Online not only has odds on the Egg Bowl, where Ole Miss is favored by 7.5; it has odds on where Kiffin will coach next, where the Rebels are not, in fact, favored. LSU is.

Because this is Lane Kiffin.

We still can’t take our eyes off of him.