BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Lane Kiffin, wearing a white T-shirt, white shorts and a white visor, walked off the field after LSU’s first spring practice and wasted little time addressing the stratospheric expectations surrounding his highly hyped arrival on the bayou.
“Things don’t happen overnight,” Kiffin cautioned before he’d even been asked a question by a throng of reporters inside a team meeting room in LSU’s football operations building. “We’re making some first steps.
“There’s a ton of work,” Kiffin continued, “to get the program back up to where everybody around here wants it to be.”
Noting that the Tigers went 7-6 last season, Kiffin added that it’s “a long jump to go to the level that I came here to get at.”
Kiffin has begun his tenure by remaking the roster, adding close to 40 transfers and more than a dozen signees. In all, there were 54 new players on the field to open spring practice.