Pete Golding stood at a podium on Monday four days out from the biggest home game of his tenure, and the most memorable thing he said had nothing to do with Lane Kiffin.
It had to do with a high school dance.
To me, it’s like high school homecoming for these dudes. Like, if you focus on the wrong s—, right, that homecoming dance ain’t very fun after you get your butt beat on a Friday night.
That is the whole week in one sentence, and it is the second time in four days Golding has reached for profanity to make a point stick. The first was about his secondary. This one is about everything surrounding the football game — College GameDay, a concert in town, a returning head coach, and a building full of people who have been waiting nine months for Saturday night.
He will not let it be about Kiffin
Asked the first question of the press conference about keeping the main thing the main thing, Golding immediately widened the frame past his former boss.
“Both schools put themselves in great position to have a top 10 matchup,” he said. “To open up SEC conference play for us at home with College GameDay. So there’s so much on the line just from what the game means.”
Then he made the argument that reunions are no longer special: “That’s not unique to one game anymore. I mean, it’s not going to be no different when we play Missouri. Now with the portal and coaches going different places every year, there’s always relationships that are there.”
He conceded the obvious — “obviously this one being unique, their head ball coach recruited a lot of these guys” — and then closed it off. “Regardless who we play, you’re playing a top 10 team in this league. If you don’t prepare really well and practice really well and play your best game, you’re probably not going to win the game regardless who it is.”
Later, asked how often this game has come up in his own head since he took the job in December, he gave an answer that will disappoint anyone hunting for a grudge.
“I can’t say that I naturally have thought about it since day one. I really haven’t,” he said. “It’s always been there from everybody else’s perspective of a little bit of the ex deal, right? And here we go. And the who’s-better piece of it. But I love going against guys that I’ve worked with, that I’ve got relationships with. The competitive part, no different than you and your buddies going to play golf.”
Still friends. The football talk stopped.
The most quietly revealing exchange came when a reporter asked flatly whether the two men still speak.
“From a friendship standpoint, I’ve developed a really good relationship with him for over three and a half years,” Golding said. “And from a football professional standpoint, we don’t bounce ideas off of each other or anything like that like we used to. I’ll definitely receive a text or I’ll text him or a call about other stuff. So definitely still friends.”
The friendship survived. The shop talk did not. That is a precise description of what happens when a coordinator becomes a head coach at a school his old boss now has to beat.
Familiarity is a trap, not a weapon
Asked whether knowing the other staff makes game planning easier or harder, Golding argued it mostly makes it harder — the opposite of what Kiffin said the same day from Baton Rouge.
“There’s a very big database of going against somebody for three and a half years every spring, every fall camp, all the scrimmages,” he said. “So I think it’s really easy to overthink things as well and try to have a plan for everything they’ve ever done under the sun, which is really tough within one week for your players. You’ve got to put your focus and decide what are you trying to stop based on who they have and who we got. So sometimes you can make it a lot harder than it should be when you know somebody really well.”
He also confirmed the signal-stealing question is live. “When you have this much turnover on the other side, you’ve got to make sure that you’re giving yourself the best shot. A lot of that is from a signaling operation and the terminology you use — which you kind of do every offseason. And then you’ve got to have multiple ways to signal within the same game.”
He is not done with the secondary
Two days after saying he did not have five defensive backs who do their job right, Golding was asked what the Charlotte tape showed on a second viewing. He gave ground, then took it back.
“I thought we made some strides in some things,” he said. “I thought some guys improved. But it’s still consistently across the board regardless who’s in the game. The thing for me is making the same mistake again regardless who’s in. And that was the frustrating piece — when you get something corrected the previous week and you drill it and you walk through it and you practice it, shows up in the game, you don’t make the layup the first time, and then they come back to it again and then you still make the same mistake.”
The one back-end name he volunteered was a good one. Ladarian Clardy — “Squirrel” at the podium — played roughly three quarters of the Charlotte game and was the player Golding said flashed.
“His athleticism, the ability to close — I thought he was physical at the point of attack,” Golding said. “That’s probably the most consistent he’s been. Wasn’t perfect by any means, but I thought he took a big step.”
He also named Jonathan Maldonado and Luke Ferrelli as players getting better every week, credited Tahj Butler with doing “some good things,” and singled out two freshmen. Dorian Barney got real snaps at corner with the room banged up. Landon Barnes played hard and cost the defense two drives: “Obviously really good effort and playing with toughness, but we’ve got to play a little smarter. We had the personal foul and then the face mask that kind of extended drives.”
Deuce Knight is more than the hurdle
The play everybody replayed from Saturday was a hurdle. Golding wanted to talk about everything around it.
“I know everybody sees the hurdle and the athleticism that we all knew,” he said. “But I thought he came in and played with tempo. I thought he took the free access throws. I thought he delivered the ball really well. I thought he made good decisions. He probably wants one or two of those throws back, but I think his release is better. His timing is better.”
He credited Joe Judge and John David Baker with the development, then added the part every Ole Miss fan already feels: “You just love the athlete. You feel like every time the ball’s in his hands, he could take it the distance.”
Kewan Lacy played hurt, and Golding made a point of it
The heaviest workload of Lacy’s season came with a thigh bruise and a hip pointer, and Golding turned that into a lesson for the roster.
“There’s a difference between being injured and being hurt,” he said. “Very rarely are you going to feel 100 percent in this league throughout it. That’s what I appreciated about Kewan. It didn’t matter who we were playing. It was, ‘No, Coach, it’s a thigh bruise and it’s a hip pointer. Like, I’m good. Those are my guys.’”
Then the part that was really aimed at the rest of the room: “A lot of guys, based on who we were playing, especially with his name and his success, could be like, ‘Nah, Coach, I need this week.’ And that wasn’t him.”
The injury report
Monday was an off day. Golding laid out Tuesday’s practice plan player by player, and the headline is that everybody who missed Charlotte is back on the field in some form.
- Tommy Kinsler IV — back at full practice. “Tommy will go tomorrow.”
- Caleb Odom — back in on scout periods.
- Shareef Denson — all scout periods.
- Antonio Kite — some scout periods. “Not the whole practice, but he will do some.”
- Denzel — scout periods. A name that has not appeared in Ole Miss coverage before Monday.
“Everybody that we didn’t have in that game, we’re expecting tomorrow to be able to practice,” Golding said.
On the offensive line, Kinsler’s absence was framed as a gift rather than a loss. “With Tommy being down, it gave us the ability to see Connor snap in and snap out. I thought Connor took the next step. We’ve got to create depth and guys that could play winning football at that position to be able to sustain in this league.” He noted it matters that Patrick Kutas is lined up beside whoever is in there: “He does a really good job from a communication standpoint.”
What he sees in LSU
On Sam Leavitt, Golding was direct about the plan: take away the legs.
“Coming off the injury, I think there was a lot of questions of how well would he really move, and he moves really well,” he said. “He’s got better top-end speed than I knew. So I think it’s going to be really important to try to make him become a pocket passer.”
He also made a point about sample size that is worth holding onto: LSU’s new offense has, by his count, produced roughly one game of usable tape. “You don’t have the same sample size you normally would in a two-game, just based on the flow of the game. So there’s really about two halves. You really got one game.”
On the three former Rebels now on the other sideline, he was matter-of-fact. Winston Watkins is “a huge part of their offense, very rarely comes off the field” — used in the backfield, on the rocket sweep, in the quarterback power game, and on shots downfield. “We’re definitely going to have to know where 6 is.” Of Princewill Umanmielen and TJ Dottery: “I’m not surprised by anything that I read about them or see their stats. There’s a reason they started for us.”
The crowd is a tactic, not a feeling
Asked how the team uses the atmosphere, Golding gave the least sentimental answer available.
“The helmet-to-helmet communication now in college football, it’s a lot harder when you’ve got 67,000 people screaming,” he said. “So much of that communication is done from the sideline to the player now that I think crowds now can neutralize that. And now you’re making 18- to 21-year-old kids make their own decisions, right, and not the coach’s decision.”
Cadence operations and check-with-me systems, he said, are “definitely affected by it.” Loud is not a mood. It is a scheme problem for the visitor.
And then he asked Oxford to behave
The last substantive answer of the press conference was the one that will travel furthest, and it was not about football at all.
“What this place has always been about, and why so many people love coming here and respect this place, is because of the people that are here and how they make them feel when they come here,” Golding said. “When you meet Ole Miss and alumni, they’re so respectful, they’re appreciative, they’re very welcoming.”
He gave the crowd its permissions first — “there’s nothing wrong with being competitive and being in the moment and being really loud and being an unbelievable fan and providing an unbelievable atmosphere for our players and really hard to play in for their players” — and then drew the line.
Let’s not lose that over a game, over a person, or anything else like that.
Pete Golding
A head coach four days out from the biggest home game of his career spent part of his press conference asking 67,000 people not to embarrass the place. Read that however you like. It was not an accident, and he was not asked twice.
The bottom line he keeps coming back to
“We haven’t had an open discussion of why this game is so different than another game,” Golding said. “I’m not saying some of them don’t feel that way. But it’s a top 10 matchup and it’s at home and it’s SEC play and it’s GameDay. I think whether Coach Kiffin was coaching this team or not, in order for their preparation to be the right way to win the game, it’s going to be exactly the same.”
And then the sentence that is the actual scouting report on Saturday night:
“It’s going to be the team that can eliminate the noise and the distractions to be able to focus on preparing the right way and practicing really well, taking care of the football, tackling extremely well on defense, and eliminating explosive plays that’s going to win the game. And that’s how it should be. So if they do that better than we will, they’re going to win the game. If we do that better than them, we’ll win the game.”
One more thing, because somebody asked on behalf of their kids: the hoodie is not a superstition. “Y’all need to go upstairs, and it’s like 42 degrees in this building every day,” Golding said. He wears long sleeves at practice everywhere he has been, to skip sunscreen, and he likes the pocket for his call sheet. “I’m not Belichick, you know, I can’t pull that off.”
No. 7 LSU visits No. 8 Ole Miss on Saturday, September 19 at 6:30 p.m. CT on ABC. ESPN College GameDay is in Oxford.
Quotes from Pete Golding’s LSU week press conference, September 14, 2026. Photo: Kewan Lacy (5) reacts after a touchdown run during the first quarter, September 12, 2026, at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Petre Thomas-Imagn Images.
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