OXFORD, Miss. — Maybe LSU can focus solely on football for a while.

The Tigers certainly hope so.

Because the first three weeks of "football" have been complicated by all kinds of non-football stuff. It all came to a climax Saturday night with a 32-24 loss to Ole Miss.

The game was preceded by a week-long buildup to Tigers head coach Lane Kiffin’s long-anticipated return to the place that he all but promised he'd never depart and then left less than 10 months ago as the Rebels team he built was heading to the CFP for the first time.

The battle between Kiffin’s current No. 7 team and his No. 8 former team was secondary to Kiffin’s return, just as the aftermath of LSU’s dominant 51-10 victory against Clemson two weeks earlier in its opener was complicated by the SEC’s flirtation with kicking the Tigers out of the conference because Kiffin was flirting with adding to his roster a couple of players who had gone to training camp with NFL teams before being released and enrolling at LSU.

The game Saturday was destined to be the most hyped game in recent memory as soon as the SEC released its schedule.

But the hype has been growing in recent weeks, partly because the two recruits in question that Kiffin brought in were former Rebels and partly because Ole Miss served another former Rebel, defensive end Princewill Umanmielen, with court papers related to the school’s lawsuit against him as the player was leaving the Tigers’ practice facility a few days ago.

Then LSU quarterback Sam Leavitt showed up on the Wednesday practice report out of the blue and was listed as doubtful before being upgraded to questionable on Thursday then removed from the list Friday and playing the entire game Saturday, all of which led to speculation that Kiffin was exaggerating if not fabricating any uncertainty about the quarterback’s availability.

Leavitt certainly played like a quarterback who was less than 100 percent as Ole Miss rolled to a 24-7 halftime lead, though he led a 17-0 second-half blitz before the Rebels took the lead back in the fourth quarter and the Tigers’ final drive ended when Leavitt was intercepted on a fourth-and-goal pass in the end zone in the final minute.

LSU shouldn’t fall more than a spot or two in the AP poll and it still controls its CFP hopes – if it can successfully navigate a remaining schedule that includes four teams that were ranked going into Saturday and games against Kentucky and Mississippi State that seem trickier than they did when the schedule was released.

That’s a lot of football that shouldn’t feature Kiffin complications – with the exception of the visit to Tennessee, where folks were no happier about Kiffin leaving after one season to coach USC than the folks in Oxford were about the coach leaving last December after six seasons.

But there is always time for new Kiffin stuff to develop along the way.