Showtime may focus on Owls

BOCA RATON — Florida Atlantic football and new coach Lane Kiffin could soon be coming to a TV screen near you.

A producer of Showtime’s “A Season With” met with Kiffin about the possibility of featuring the Owls on a Showtime production, though not necessarily “A Season With,” a documentary series that follows a college football team throughout the year.

FAU Athletic Director Pat Chun labeled the discussions as “preliminary” and “nothing substantive to talk about.”

“They approached Lane first to see if they’d have any interest,” Chun said. “It is literally in its infant stages right now that it’s not even worth talking about. We have to go through the whole pros and cons and we have to make a value-based decision on is that the right thing to do for us? I haven’t even formally sat down with their production crew. It’s that infant of a stage that I haven’t had one formal sit-down meeting with them.”

Although the Owls may not eventually be featured on a Showtime production, the fact that they have been considered a candidate is noteworthy for a program that has gone 3-9 in the last three seasons and fired its coach in November. But Kiffin’s celebrity status and past jobs in Oakland, Tennessee, USC and Alabama make FAU a compelling storyline.

Chun said he has not watched “A Season With,” and the school would have to look into if it was interested in partnering with Showtime. The network featured Notre Dame and Florida State the past two seasons on “A Season With.”

“We have to do an analysis first of what goes on,” Chun said. “Then we need to sit down and make a decision. It’s so at its infant stages.

“The good thing in our world is you get thrown a bunch of great ideas at you — or a bunch of ideas, not all of them are great. Part of my job is to figure out which ideas are the best for us and which ones aren’t.

“We’ll do some due diligence and we’ll do an internal analysis to see if that’s the right thing for us. Like I said, I haven’t even formally sat down with them yet.”

In 2016, the Owls were featured on Fox Sports’ “FAU Football: Inside the Owls’ Burrow,” a weekly 30-minute program hosted by Frank Forte.