Juice Kiffin Is Ole Miss’s Most Valuable Player—And Its Furriest

In his office at the Manning Center, University of Mississippi head football coach Lane Kiffin puts a foot on the edge of his desk and leans back in his chair. He’s right in the middle of describing how he landed one of his best recruits ever, and that recruit’s positive effect on the entire program, when said recruit—sinewy, sixty-six pounds, maybe two feet tall, yellow, hairy—zooms into the coach’s office after a tossed sock and, in one slick movement, retrieves it, turns on a dime, and zips back out.

That recruit, of course, is the head coach’s two-and-a-half-year-old British Labrador retriever, Juice Kiffin. And over the course of two seasons, Juice has risen in the rankings to become not only the unofficial mascot of the Ole Miss football team but also a social media star, with a rollicking personality and a face even a Mississippi State fan could love.

Juice is committed: You can find him at the Manning Center’s football facilities many days, popping in and out of offices in search of food or scratches. He attends practices, participates in pregame traditions, sits (or, at times, naps) on the Ole Miss sidelines during home games, and serves as the main attraction during a pivotal week of recruiting now known as Juice Fest. Last season, once a game, Juice retrieved the tee after an Ole Miss kickoff, hurtling to and from midfield as the stadium announcer bellowed, “The Juice is looooose!” and sixty thousand–plus fans—some wearing official Juice merchandise or JUICE 4 HEISMAN pins, or holding a giant Fathead cutout of his face—screamed with joy. “I’d like to claim all of this was by design,” Kiffin says. “But it wasn’t. It just kind of happened.”

That serendipity sparked back in the spring of 2022. Kiffin’s daughter Landry, then a high school junior, desired a puppy. “She wanted a German shepherd,” Kiffin says, “and I called a vet in town, Lee Payne, and he said, ‘No, no. You want a Lab; they’re better with children.’” So Payne introduced Kiffin to Tom Smith, the owner of Wildrose Kennels, outside of Oxford. Smith happened to have a puppy available, and that same day, Kiffin and his family drove out. “Landry saw the puppy, and of course wanted two of them,” Kiffin says. “He was the fattest and calmest one there,” recalls Landry, who’s now an Ole Miss sophomore. “But he didn’t end up being the calmest.”

Landry named him Juice, and says that her father, who initially was hesitant to get a dog, fell for him right away. “I’d walk into the house, and they’d be asleep on the couch together,” she says. But Juice, like any Lab puppy, was also a menace early on, biting Kiffin’s ankles and tearing up rooms, and his Twitter (now X) account, which went live when he was four months old, documented much of the destruction. “I was seeing Juice’s misadventures on social media,” Smith says. “So I texted Coach and said, ‘I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on that dog for some training.’ He said he’d think about it. Four days later, he texted me back that he was ready. I said, ‘What time do you want me there in the morning?’”

Thus Juice entered Wildrose’s gundog program. He took to it well. “Once I got some discipline into him, and once he figured out the game, he was all about it,” says Smith, who has hunted pheasant and quail with Juice (Kiffin does not hunt). “When Juice is working, he doesn’t want to be petted or talked to. He just wants to work.”

When Kiffin and his family went to Wildrose to see Juice after his training, they watched Smith put the pooch through his exercises. “It blew me away,” Kiffin says. “I would have thought that when Juice saw me and the kids that he’d come right over. But he was so laser focused, like a game-day player.”

From that point on, Juice and Smith basically became members of the Ole Miss football program. (Smith says his unofficial title is Special Assistant to the Head Coach for Juice Training.) At six and a half months old, Juice first led the players and coaches on the hallowed pregame Walk of Champions through the Grove during the 2022 season, as thousands of students and fans chanted and cheered, and has continued to since. (A coach’s child usually walks him, as Smith hovers nearby.) On the team bus ride to the Grove beforehand, Smith and Juice sit in the front row behind the driver, with Kiffin in the row beside them.

Before the walk, “I make sure he gets out a number two,” Smith says. Once inside the stadium, “if it’s a number one, I can take him to a bush outside of the tunnel.” Otherwise, they stand on the sideline, near the twenty-five-yard line, a slight distance away from the players and the mayhem (“Cleats and tails don’t mix,” Smith explains). And while Juice and Kiffin don’t interact during games, “if Juice sees his dad, he locks in on him and pulls on the lead,” Smith says. 

Kiffin, for his part, stays so focused on the gridiron action that he does not typically notice Juice—save for once. “One game, I saw him out of the corner of my eye running onto the field,” he says. “I suddenly got really nervous that he was going to take off and start running all over the field.” Then Kiffin remembered that Juice was merely retrieving the tee, something the Lab and Smith had been working on for months, staying late after practices with the special teams’ players and even getting the stadium crew to turn on the lights in the evenings so they could rehearse for night games.

Juice has had only one mishap during his tee retrievals and, to be fair, it wasn’t his fault. The team’s kicker had unexpectedly switched from his usual black kicking tee to one in a light shade of green that was hard for Juice to see. “He ran out on the field and missed it, and was looking for it, and I hammered the whistle and called him back,” Smith says. Juice took it all in stride. “He’s such a well-socialized dog that all of the noise and people at the game don’t bother him,” Smith says. “In fact, I know dogs don’t think like us, but I really believe he relishes the spotlight, that he’s kind of like, ‘All of these people are here to see me.’”

Sure, other SEC teams have dogs on their sidelines. Most famously, Uga, a succession of white English bulldogs, at Georgia (one of whom tried to bite an Auburn player during a 1996 game), but also Smokey, a bluetick coonhound, at Tennessee; Reveille, a rough-coated collie, at Texas A&M; and various English bulldogs nicknamed Bully at Ole Miss’s archrival, Mississippi State. 

All of these canines, though, are something Juice is not: official live mascots, with histories going back decades. To that point, Juice’s fresh-on-the-scene, unofficial status—along with his lovable Labradorian personality—plays into his appeal. He endures none of the pressure of those working stiffs. (At least not yet: Ole Miss has had trouble settling on a costumed mascot, with three different ones in the last twenty-one years…)

Part of Juice’s devil-may-care charm comes thanks to his social media presence. He has 32,400 followers on Instagram, but really works his magic on X, where his followers number 58,200—more than anyone in the Ole Miss football program, save his dad. His bio there reads, in part, “The only child of @LaneKiffin that can be trusted with a credit card.” His tone is droll. (One of his first tweets: “I will bite any @HailStateFB fan that gets too close. I will also bite any @OleMissFB fan that gets to [sic…he’s a dog] close. I’m going through a phase.”) And sometimes, a bit troll-y. He made lighthearted fun of the University of Miami football team last season when they failed to close out a game. And when an Ole Miss linebacker transferred to Auburn in 2023 and tweeted “the grass way greener,” Juice reposted the tweet with a photo of himself sitting in some extra green grass. Juice’s X account bears some resemblance to Kiffin’s, though it’s run by Alex Collins, Ole Miss’s assistant athletic director for recruiting operations. “Sometimes I’ll give Alex some ideas for some things that maybe I don’t want to say on Twitter,” Kiffin admits, “things a little on the edge.”

But Juice has come to have a bigger impact offline. “The recruits, and especially their moms, come here and the first thing they want to do is see Juice,” Kiffin says. Juice also visits sick children and senior homes, and in April, he even received an honorary degree from the University of Mississippi School of Law. This past fall, he was the centerpiece of a school-wide Get Out the Vote effort (JUICE FOR PRESIDENT signs popped up around campus). He’s so popular that one time before a game, he and Smith visited the Grove to see some students and “Juice was mobbed,” Smith recalls. “We had to get out of there after twenty minutes because he was red from his nose to behind his ears from sorority girl lipstick.”

Juice especially brings a little juice to the team and facilities. On a recent practice day, the pup and Smith made the rounds. Near the indoor practice field, they ran into hard-hitting linebacker Tyler Banks, whose face lit up as he bent down to scratch Juice’s chin. In the weight room, six-foot-six, 340-pound offensive lineman Diego Pounds stopped in the middle of a stretch with a “Yo, Juice!” and petted his head. “Juice is probably the most loved person in the building,” says Caden Davis, the Ole Miss kicker. “And it’s like he knows it—like he knows he’s famous.”

Kiffin says one of the biggest benefits is that Juice “seems to lower the anxiety.” Tyler Viens, a coordinator of football operations, agrees. “We have a lot of moments during the season that are high pressure, high stress, and then Juice comes around and the mood lightens for a second. He’s here in the moment.”

Juice’s time at Wildrose has even informed some of Kiffin’s lessons for the team. “The training and the repetition they do are similar to football,” Kiffin says. “Tom never lets Juice get away with a repetition that is just okay. He does it until he can’t get it wrong. A lot of what Tom does has a Saban feel to it.” (Kiffin served as Nick Saban’s offensive coordinator at Alabama from 2014 to 2016.) His discipline also sets an example. “Juice acts different around Tom,” Kiffin says. “Tom doesn’t let him get away with anything. But with Landry and me, he does. It seems obvious, but it was so glaring that I reminded the coaches that the players, though they obviously aren’t dogs, do the same thing with us.”

So about that last bit—what Juice gets away with. One of Juice’s most endearing qualities is that he can be a bit naughty. Like most Labs, he enjoys chewing things. He has obliterated a pair of $500 sunglasses and eaten the heels off of a prized pair of Kiffin’s custom-made sneakers. He once swallowed a finishing nail (it passed through him). He nibbled on Tim Tebow’s headset during a live SEC Network show. If you look closely at the Magnolia Bowl Trophy (presented annually to the winner of the Ole Miss–LSU game), you might notice a few teeth marks on the wood, courtesy of you-know-who. And that red bandage on his leg in these photos? It’s from a kitchen mishap that required stitches.

Juice brings smarts to his troublemaking, too. He can easily open almost any trash can. “He’ll walk into one of the coaches’ offices, ransack a trash can, and walk out like nothing happened,” Smith says. One day, Thad Rivers, an associate athletic director, put Juice in an office. Juice figured out how to open the door from the inside. “He was gone,” Rivers says. “I put out an APB.” Rivers later found him at a fraternity house across campus. “Some guys were shooting hoops behind the house, and Juice was just hanging out,” Rivers says. Another day, Juice escaped Kiffin’s office and got lost for a few hours, only to turn up roaming the stands of Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, having made his way down two flights of stairs, past a few doors, and through a tunnel to get there. 

Then there was the time during practice when Smith noticed that Juice was having some digestive issues. He asked if anyone knew why and was told that Juice had busted into the running back coach’s office and eaten a cake. “Not a piece of cake, an entire cake,” Smith says. “He just has a hilarious personality. It’s like he’s got a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other and is like, ‘Where’s the next party?’”