NEW ORLEANS – Lane Kiffin hasn’t seen these many admirers in a long time, maybe as far back as the time his birthday party came complete with balloons.
The 39-year-old offensive coordinator at Alabama, hired from the unemployment line in January by Nick Saban to add zest to the Crimson Tide’s run-oriented, pound-it-down-your-throat scheme, has been a lightning rod for criticism wherever he has roamed the sidelines, and keeping track of his whereabouts would fry a GPS.
Kiffin has been the master of the reverse resume, or at least he’s got this interview thing down pat. The son of former Jets defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin was just 31 when Al Davis made him the youngest coach in Raiders’ history in 2007, but he went 5-15 before being fired, Davis said, for “bringing disgrace to the organization.”
Kiffin then spent one infamous season as the head coach at Tennessee, where he improved the Volunteers’ record to 7-6 in 2009, but only before publicly accusing then-Florida coach Urban Meyer of illegal recruiting.
Hired in January 2010 as the head coach at USC – reeling from scholarship restrictions under the watch of Pete Carroll, who had bolted to the NFL – Kiffin went 8-5, 10-2 and 7-6 before being fired five games into the 2013 season after losing his first two conference games.
So when Saban called Kiffin to travel to Tuscaloosa last December for an eight-day chalk talk on offensive philosophies, not many would have made Kiffin a favorite to replace Alabama offensive coordinator Doug Nussmeier, who was leaving for the coordinator’s job in Michigan.
After 12 months in the Saban laboratory – a place where players and coaches are subjected to quality-control experiments on a 24/7 basis – Kiffin is smiling broadly enough for both himself and his head coach. Entering Thursday’s College Football Playoff semifinals against Ohio State, Alabama’s offense has cranked out four games of at least 600 yards in total offense and 36.9 points per game.
And, Kiffin has done it with a senior quarterback, Blake Sims, who waited four years for his turn to play after having started his college career as a running back.
Having been a head coach at the highest level, Kiffin said it would have been difficult for him to take a college assistant’s job “if you’re going to a place where the head coach doesn’t really have the system going or maybe is still trying to figure himself out or is not having a lot of success.”
“That was why this was so perfect for me to come into,” Kiffin said. “You come in here, you don’t question anything. It’s been great. I should pay him for this opportunity to be able to come in and learn from him. There’s a lot of really good coaches, but I don’t think there’s a lot of coaches who coach the coaches like he does every day.”
Kiffin likes Saban’s blunt approach on the sidelines, even if it means getting verbally undressed on national TV.
“Coach told me this from the beginning, ‘I’m going to tell you exactly what’s on my mind, good or bad, and then we’re going to move on, and I’m not even going to think about it again,’” Kiffin said. “That’s a really good quality.”
In private moments away from the TV cameras, Kiffin and Saban have been able to share their favorite war stories. When Kiffin returned to Knoxville in October to face the school he once spurned, he feared for his family’s safety.
“I was sitting there before the game [with Saban], and I said, ‘Who would have thought, Coach, that one day I was going to go back here as an assistant, working for you, and how this crowd was [taunting me] getting off the bus, and then in our next game, we’re going to go into LSU and have the same thing happen to you?’” Kiffin said. “He’s funnier than you think. He made a joke one time, ‘How did you get higher on the most-hated list than I did when it came out a few years ago?’ ”