The Florida job came open this week when the Gators fired fourth-year coach Billy Napier. And with that, the speculation about who the next coach will be has begun. Ole Miss head man Lane Kiffin has received as much publicity as anyone in that regard.

Could Kiffin be the next guy up for Florida? It seems likely, based on early reporting, that Florida will pursue him. But would Kiffin take the job if offered?

College football analyst Josh Pate tackled that question on Tuesday night on Josh Pate’s College Football Show. Pate believes Lane Kiffin would take the job, though he described his confidence as “53-to-47” on the topic.

There are compelling cases to be made on both sides. Starting with Ole Miss.

“I just wonder what legacy means to him,” Pate said. “This is kind of the case I would make if I were Ole Miss: ‘Yes, there are edges that Florida has, but this is 2025 college football. Those are not the edges they used to be. If this were 1997, if this were 2010, it’s understandable. It’s 2025. And truth be told, our NIL structure may be even better built right now than theirs is.’ Ole Miss is ahead of the curve and has been ahead of the curve on that front.”

Would that be enough to get Lane Kiffin to stay? Even with a lucrative offer from Florida?

Well, let’s tackle the Florida pitch to see what Kiffin might be weighing. Pate continued on.

“The Florida folks would push back and say, ‘Yeah, well how many staffers have you lost that you wanted to retain?’” Pate said. “‘How many have we lost down here? And we had a guy en route to being fired. Yours can stay there as long as he wants to and he still can’t retain staff. He would never have that problem here. And if we got the right coach here the machine behind him that we’ll build with NIL will dwarf anything you have.’ OK. Maybe that’s true.”

Pate broke down the Lane Kiffin question from another angle, using a metaphor of sorts to get there. Here’s what he had to say.

“How much does legacy mean to Lane Kiffin?” Pate said. “Because right now Lane’s been in Oxford for a while, and he’s at the pinnacle of his career. And if you’re watching in real time, you never really know you’re in the good old days, you’re in the prime of your career. But you’ve got to think of it in documentary terms.

“Fast forward 30 years. You career, I would guess, is over. You’re looking back on it, and there’s a fork in the road. And you’re either going to decide my life is in Oxford, Miss., I’m the head coach at Ole Miss. And if you decide to go that route, you’ll end up winning several more years at Ole Miss. And you will fundamentally alter that town and there will be stuff named after you and buildings and streets named after you one day if you do your job correctly. That’s one path at the fork in the road.”

So what does the opposite side look like? The Florida side?

“The other path is you want to find out how you would do at the University of Florida because you think you can win a national championship there and you’re not sure you can win one at Ole Miss,” Pate said. “And that means more to you than legacy.”

Right now, Pate doesn’t have a strong feel for what Lane Kiffin might do if offered the Florida job. And there remains a scenario where that never happens in the first place.

For now, though, Pate left his viewers with this. He concluded.

“I’m not saying either is wrong,” he said. “I am quite literally asking: What matters more? That’s what you’ll find out if this goes from theoretical to actual. If it’s put in front of him, you have an offer in front of you to be the next head coach of the Florida Gators, then and only then will you really find out.

“And everyone’s got these slam dunk theories. ‘Oh he’ll absolutely take it,’ or ‘Oh, he’s not leaving.’ You don’t know. He may not even know. Or maybe he does. But if he does, by my estimation he hasn’t told many people.”