Ole Miss football coach and social-media instigator Lane Kiffin landed a big and bizarre-looking fish in Florida during the lead up to Independence Day. We know this because of Kiffin’s July 1 X post, which shows him on an offshore boat holding a trumpetfish with a hook in its beak.
“Florida Record Trumpet Fish 62 ½ inches,” Kiffin wrote in the post, seeming to imply that the strange-looking saltwater fish was a new state record. It was not. And in all likelihood, the coach was kidding.
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Because although Kiffin’s trumpetfish might have been one of the bigger specimens caught in state waters, the species is not eligible for a Florida record, according to the guidelines set by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission. (The FWC includes a full list of the 81 eligible record species on its website.) The West Atlantic trumpetfish is classified as “unregulated” by the state, which means there are no specific bag limits, and it’s listed as “Least Concern” by the IUCN.
The tropical fish’s native range stretches from Florida south to Brazil, where they’re often caught as bycatch by commercial anglers. They’re also sometimes caught by recreational fishermen targeting reefs. These long and slender fish are carnivores, and they have the chameleon-like ability to rapidly change colors and blend into their surroundings.
Kiffin, who’s preparing to start his sixth season as the Rebels’ head coach, also used the X post to shout out President Trump (@realDonaldTrump) and the Gulf of America, an international water body that Trump renamed via executive order in January.
Coach Kiffin — aka Joey Freshwater — regularly uses social media to ruffle feathers or land jokes. He’s one of the most active and followed social-media users in the NCAA coaching world, and he’s spoken about his penchant for posting in past interviews.
“I looked at social media, when I started, it was for recruiting because we weren’t able to text [the recruits]. Dumb NCAA rule, like most of them … So that’s why I started,” Kiffin told Theo Von during a podcast in May. “And then I just started being a normal person. I was like, you know, I can’t be a normal person in a coach and in a lot of my life. So I was like, on social media, I’ll just be normal.”
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For a competitive coach from the Midwest who likes to fish in his off time, being a “normal” social media user also means using the platforms to rib your buddies and rivals. Kiffin currently has a friendly online rivalry with Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze, in which the two coaches take shots at each other over things like recruiting, golfing, and, of course, fishing. Since 2022, the two SEC football coaches regularly use fish pics to troll one another.
Kiffin’s latest shot at Freeze was made five days after the trumpetfish post. The X post tagging Freeze shows a 180-plus-pound yellowfin tuna hanging at a dock in Destin on Florida’s Gulf coast. He could just be letting Freeze know he caught another big fish, or it could be a dig on Freeze’s ability to bring star players — big fish — into his program.
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