His last relationship ended in the week of a home defeat two years ago and nobody reported it. A new biography has put it on the record.
Lane Kiffin has not been publicly linked to a girlfriend since 2024. The woman who moved to Baton Rouge after he took the LSU job is Layla Kiffin, his ex-wife and the mother of his three children. They divorced in 2016, were seen together again in December 2024 and have been together since. They have not remarried and no engagement has been reported. Neither of them has said in public what they now are to each other.
Lane Being Lane, a biography by the CBS Sports reporter John Talty, was published on 15 September and carries the first account of how Kiffin’s last relationship ended. Four days later he went back to Oxford as head coach of Louisiana State and lost 32-24 to Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi team he left last November.
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The last woman he called his girlfriend
On 1 August 2023 Kiffin posted a photograph to mark National Girlfriend Day. The woman in it was Sally Rychlak. It is the only time he has publicly used the word about anyone.
Little about her has ever been confirmed:
- She studied marketing at Ole Miss from 2015 to 2019 and worked at the university for about three years afterwards, according to reporting at the time drawn from her LinkedIn profile
- Southern Methodist University in Dallas lists her as a major gifts officer
- Her age has never been confirmed by either of them. The Spun reported it as 27 in 2023
The relationship ended in the week Ole Miss lost 20-17 at home to unranked Kentucky on 28 September 2024. Talty writes that Kiffin had split days earlier from a girlfriend of more than two years and spent that week thinking about the relationship rather than the opponent. As it played out, he sent screenshots of their messages to his coaching staff group chat. Talty does not name her, and nobody reported the breakup at the time.
Why the marriage ended in 2016
Kiffin met Layla Reaves in 1999 at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where she worked and his father Monte was the defensive coordinator. They married the following year, by her own account in a 2009 interview with the Gainesville Sun, which would make it a marriage of 16 years. Most published accounts give the wedding as 2004. Their children are Landry, Presley and Monte Knox.
The marriage came apart while Kiffin was offensive coordinator at Alabama. Layla and the children never moved to Tuscaloosa and stayed in California. Talty’s book reports that Terry Saban, the head coach’s wife, had heard from friends that Kiffin was out trying to pick up women, and that Nick Saban sent a message down through his staff. One former coach quoted in the book recalls it this way:
“You’ve got to keep Lane away from the girls that are in college. Just keep him away from the sorority girls. Make sure they’ve graduated college or are working a job.”
Kiffin announced the divorce through Fox Sports in February 2016, calling it mutual. Layla filed the following month, citing irreconcilable differences.
He stopped drinking in January 2021. He told Vanity Fair this year that a drinking problem ran through his early years in coaching and damaged the marriage. He had started on beer, the magazine reported, before developing a taste for vodka.
How Lane and Layla Kiffin got back together
The reconciliation ran through the eleven months in which Kiffin lost both of his parents. Monte Kiffin died in Oxford on 11 July 2024, aged 84. Robin Kiffin died there on 17 June 2025, aged 81.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| Sept 2024 | His relationship with Rychlak ends in the week of the Kentucky defeat |
| Dec 2024 | He and Layla are seen together in New York |
| Jan 2025 | He posts a birthday photograph of her. Commenters ask whether she is his daughter |
| Mar 2025 | He posts her to his Instagram Story with a house emoji, read at the time as the announcement |
| Apr 2025 | A picture of the two of them captioned “Ride or die.” Their eldest daughter comments “Omg” |
| Jul 2025 | He names Layla among the family living in Oxford at SEC Media Days |
| Dec 2025 | She stands with him at his LSU introduction in Baton Rouge |
Robin Kiffin’s obituary lists eleven states she moved to over the years following her husband’s coaching career, from Nebraska to Mississippi. It says she “had various jobs during her life but her pride and joy was taking care of her husband and children.”
Four weeks after her death, at SEC Media Days in Atlanta, Kiffin spoke about her and about coaches’ wives generally. “You really are the glue that holds everything together in these families,” he said, “with coaches like my dad that worked so much and the mom is doing everything at home.” In the same appearance he ran through who was living in Oxford by then, and Layla was among the names.
What Layla Kiffin has done since
Kiffin took the LSU job on 30 November 2025 on a seven-year contract worth $91 million. According to Vanity Fair, his ex-wife was reported to have flown privately to look over Gainesville and Baton Rouge while he weighed the offers, and LSU was the unanimous choice in a vote among the rest of his family.
In June she told WAFB she was opening a yoga studio in Baton Rouge called Livin, and explained where the name came from.
“Livin is to be healthy, be happy, to make the best of a situation. We had just moved to Oxford, and then bam, now we’re here. I’m like, I’ve got to make the best of a crazy situation.”
Stirling, the commercial property firm that brokered the lease, announced it in July. The studio is on Nicholson Drive, near Tiger Stadium, and the announcement named Layla Kiffin and Lane Kiffin as its founders.
The word neither of them uses
Kiffin calls her his ex-wife. In May he posted that she still has access to his bank account. “She put up with me and [is an] awesome mother to my three children,” he wrote. “Why wouldn’t I share it with her???”
Divorced couples get back together without announcing anything all the time, and two people with three grown or nearly grown children owe the public no explanation. It stands out here because Kiffin explains almost everything else, at length and without being asked, including his drinking and the reputation he built at Alabama.
In the same Vanity Fair interview, he was asked how it would feel to walk back into Oxford in September. He described moving from one school to the other like this:
“The fans are like, ‘It’s a breakup, and he goes to the girl we know, considered by everyone outside the state to be a better girl.’ Now you’re going back to, like, a big family reunion, with a new girl.”
Sports Illustrated and Yahoo have both described Layla as his wife this year, which she is not. Under the birthday photograph he posted in January 2025, his own followers were asking each other whether the woman in the picture was his daughter, and what had happened to the girlfriend.
Where things stand after Saturday
Two days after the book came out, ESPN reported a text message Kiffin had sent to his attorney Tom Mars, summing it up himself. “Old unnamed sources say Lane used to argue with Saban, drink alcohol and hang out with hot women,” he wrote. “New unnamed sources say Lane gets along with Saban, doesn’t drink alcohol, but still hangs out with hot women.”
On the Friday before the game, Layla Kiffin posted a photograph of herself in a shirt reading “Not my first rodeo,” captioned “Be nice, it’s so much easier.” She also posted an image of the Mississippi welcome sign.
LSU lost the following afternoon, the first defeat since Kiffin took the job. He has six more seasons under contract in Baton Rouge, where Layla Kiffin now runs a business of her own.
Kiffin’s eldest daughter, Landry, is dating the LSU linebacker Whit Weeks. The two relationships are frequently confused.
