Pete Golding arrived at Ole Miss three years ago, lured away from Alabama due in part to personal ties. His wife went to Ole Miss, and Golding played at Delta State, a Division II school in Cleveland, Miss., where he also got his start in coaching.
“There were some family things that helped us,” Lane Kiffin said after hiring Golding. “His wife’s family is from here. That was great. Kind of like in recruiting, there’s advantages.”
As it turned out, Kiffin was also hiring his successor.
OFFICIAL | Pete Golding Named Head Football Coach at Ole Miss@CoachGolding x #HottyToddy
📰 https://t.co/62UAijwn2k pic.twitter.com/WHMFoxH65S
— Ole Miss Football (@OleMissFB) November 30, 2025
Golding, 41, was named the permanent replacement for Kiffin on Sunday and will take over as Ole Miss (11-1) prepares for the College Football Playoff. It’s a sudden career move for Golding, who has never been a head coach but has plenty of experience coaching in big games.
Golding was Alabama’s defensive coordinator from 2018 through 2022, winning one national title and two SEC championships. While his defense got criticized at times, Alabama ranked in the top three in the SEC in yards per play every season he was there, including first in 2022, after which he left to join Kiffin.
“Pete did a great job for us,” former Alabama coach Nick Saban said when Golding left. “I like Pete. He improved every year with us in terms of how he did his job, which I was always pleased with. He chose, for personal reasons, or whatever reasons, that it was a better opportunity to go someplace else.”
Saban had never met Golding but had been impressed with his work as the defensive coordinator at UTSA. Saban asked Frank Wilson, then the head coach at UTSA, what he thought of his young DC.
“I think if you interview him, he’s going to be the guy you’re gonna want to hire,” Wilson said.
“Some guys are clinicians but they don’t really know how to teach it,” Wilson said. “I pride myself in being a teacher first, and you know when a guy can communicate. You could visualize how Pete could have command of the room, whether it was over the staff or over the players. And he seemed like a fun guy to be around. He wasn’t too serious. His demeanor and personality are infectious.”
The son of a high school football coach in Hammond, La., Golding worked his way up the coaching ladder after serving as a graduate assistant at Delta State for one season. Next, he went to Tusculum, a Division II school in Tennessee, for three seasons, then back to Delta State for a couple of seasons, followed by stints at Southeastern Louisiana, Southern Miss, UTSA and then Alabama.
Chip Lindsey, currently the offensive coordinator at Michigan, coached with Golding when he was the OC at Southern Miss and coached against him as the Arizona State offensive coordinator when the Sun Devils faced UTSA. They also went up against each other in 2018 when Lindsey was Auburn’s offensive coordinator and Golding was helping run the Tide’s defense.
“Our players loved being around him,” Lindsey says of their time at Southern Miss. “He made practice fun and challenged ’em. Pete does a great job of bonding with them.
“When we played him at UTSA, we had to score late to beat them (after trailing 28-12 late in the third quarter). They probably outplayed us that night. He’s gonna try to take away the things you do best. He’s gonna present different looks, have extra guys in the box and be very aggressive. I thought he did a great job of simplifying things.”
Two years ago, before Ole Miss played Penn State in the Chick-fil-A Bowl, Golding invoked his time at smaller schools for how he built his SEC defense.
“Coaching D-II and (FCS), you say, ‘What do we have? What do we do well? Let’s put them in the best positions to do well,’” Golding said. “This day and age, I still think you need to make it fun, which I think coach Kiffin does an unbelievable job of.”
The Ole Miss defense has been up and down the past three years, enjoying its best year in 2024 when it was loaded with impact players, especially on the defensive line. This year, the Rebels rank only ninth in the SEC in yards per play allowed, and the team’s lone loss came when Georgia scored every time it touched the ball.
But Golding’s experience in the program, and seeing how Kiffin and Saban ran programs, evidently gave Ole Miss the confidence to give him the job — right as the program prepares for its first-ever Playoff appearance.
