The famous brat sat before the national media for the first time since Pat Haden fired him on the LAX tarmac and left him to find his own ride home. For Monday’s media session, Lane Kiffin wore a dark suit and a pink-striped tie, but looking spiffy was never the hard part for Kiffy. The hard part was winning games and making friends and staying employed.
At 38, he’d already been canned by the Oakland Raiders and the USC Trojans. Along the way, he’d run out on Tennessee and coached a preseason No. 1 to a .500 season and ticked off half the hemisphere. He wasn’t seen as a good coach who was a bad guy (a Bill Belichick, say) or a good guy who was a bad coach (a Ron Zook). Kiffin was that worst possible entity — bad coach, bad guy.
Fired by Southern Cal in September 2013, he sat home and waited for the phone to ring. It didn’t often. Who wanted to hire Lane Kiffin? When finally the call came, the voice on the other end belonged, improbably enough, to the best in the business. And when Nick Saban made Kiffin his offensive coordinator, more than a few folks wondered if the emperor of Alabama had mislaid his marbles.
But here Kiffin was, bright-eyed and fashionably turned, representing the Tide in advance of Thursday’s Sugar Bowl. One of Saban’s many idiosyncrasies is his refusal to allow his assistants to speak apart from the team’s preseason media day, but the College Football Playoff requires that coordinators be available. Thus was Kiffin provided a platform to sing his redemption song.
“It’s very humbling,” he said of his careening career path. “One minute you’re really hot, and the next you’re unemployed.”
In the annals of college football, there has been no odder pairing: Saban, the hardnose who smiles once a century, and Kiffin, born with a silver spoon — one he forcefully spat out — in his mouth. Against all odds, it has worked. Bama is again champion of the SEC, again poised to claim a national title, but this time it’s nearly as good on offense (No. 15 nationally) as on defense (No. 11).
Much of that has to do with the guy who apparently many thought couldn’t coach a lick. Working with a first-year starting quarterback in Gainesville’s Blake Sims, Kiffin has presided over an offense that scored 42 points against Florida, 59 against Texas A&M, 55 against Auburn and 42 against Missouri.
Just as nobody knew what to make of Saban hiring Kiffin, nobody was sold on Sims, either. He’d bided his time behind AJ McCarron, but preseason consensus held that McCarron’s replacement would be Jacob Coker, a transfer from Florida State. “The kid never once asked me about (Coker’s arrival),” Kiffin said. “I actually mentioned it to him. He said, ‘Coach, I’m not worried about it.’ “
Then: “To see that attitude pay off is great. You just don’t see it in a time when you’re looking to leave if it’s not going your way.”
Then this: “I haven’t gotten to tell this story much, but (Sims) was in the process of decommitting from Alabama. We were going to be together at Tennessee. (Then-assistant) Ed Orgeron and I visited him in his home, but two or three days later we went to USC. Circling back around, we’re together at Alabama.”
Small world, yes? And a weird one, too. The wise guy who couldn’t open his mouth without infuriating an opposing SEC coach or committing a secondary NCAA infraction used his moment under the media microscope to speak of how much football has given him, not how he’s God’s gift to football. “To see how humble a guy like Amari Cooper (the great Tide receiver) is and how hard he works … that part was missing (in exile),” Kiffin said.
About here, Pete Thamel of SI.com prefaced a question by calling Kiffin “kind of a divisive guy.” This prompted the divisive guy to smile and say, “And this was going so well.”
As for the image of Kiffin-as-brat: “You can only worry about what you can control, and that’s moving the football. I can’t be thinking, ‘That article you wrote was so bad it took me a year to recover from it.’ “
In a year, Kiffin went from pariah to finalist for the Broyles Award, which is given to the nation’s top assistant coach. (He didn’t win, but still.) Someone wondered if, having been a head coach, he worried that he mightn’t take to being an employee. “It might have been a concern if I were going to a place that didn’t have its system going, but that’s why this is so perfect. You come here and you don’t question anything.”
In little ways, he and his boss have bonded. On the team bus in Knoxville, Kiffin mentioned to Saban how he’d be booed on sight and said, “Next week at LSU, they’ll be doing the same thing to you. But how did I get higher on the most-hated list than you?”
Through years of smirks and sass, a cynic might say. But even a cynic couldn’t look on this Lane Kiffin and believe he hasn’t learned a lesson. “I should pay (Saban) for this opportunity,” he said, and darned if the brat didn’t sound sincere.
