Lane Kiffin, Lincoln Riley tied by Houston’s 2016 search
2016 Houston coaching search came close to changing fates of Lincoln Riley, Lane Kiffin
NORMAN — Lincoln Riley and his Oklahoma Sooners will welcome Lane Kiffin’s Florida Atlantic Owls to Owen Field on Saturday in a coaching matchup that wouldn’t have seemed likely based on how talks were progressing in December 2016, when the University of Houston was operating a bulldozer that could’ve changed college football’s landscape.
Every coaching search results in a ripple effect, but the epicenter of this splash was looming over Norman.
Bob Stoops was still coaching the Sooners when Riley, his offensive coordinator, interviewed for the Houston job. According to multiple sources familiar with the search, Riley was one of three finalists for the job along with Major Applewhite, who ultimately got the gig, and then-Alabama offensive coordinator Lane Kiffin,
whom Riley will face Saturday.
“It’s kind of tough to go back and put it in perspective without knowing what everyone knows now,” OU athletic director Joe Castiglione said.
What everyone knows now is that six months after Riley, according to multiple sources, withdrew his name from the Houston search, Stoops shocked the sports world by retiring from the program he led for 18 seasons.
Stoops, who will be in attendance for OU’s opener Saturday, didn’t want to hypothesize about a decision that could’ve revised Oklahoma football history: Would he still be on the Sooner sidelines had Riley taken the Houston job, leaving OU without a clear successor to the throne?
“I wasn’t in that interview,” Stoops said. “That’s him. My only advice to Lincoln was, much like when I was a young assistant at Florida, Coach (Steve) Spurrier would encourage me to not just jump at anything, to be sure that it’s really a job you want and want for a long time.”
Stoops began to field head coaching calls in 1996. None felt right. Three years later he landed the job that would define his legacy. By waiting, Stoops didn’t climb the rungs of a coaching ladder. He took an elevator to the top.
“I think that resonated with Lincoln to some degree,” Stoops said.
••• There was chaos around the Cougars program after former coach Tom Herman took the Texas job in late November 2016. Houston zeroed in on five initial candidates: Riley, Kiffin, Les Miles, and two in-house options: Applewhite and defensive coordinator Todd Orlando, now the defensive coordinator at Texas.
Speculation in Houston was swirling. Riley “hit it out of the park” in his interview, according to one report. Two days later it was reported that Kiffin would get the job, pending final negotiations.
Kiffin was so confident the job was his that, according to multiple sources familiar with the search, he was calling members of
Houston’s staff.
Hunter Yurachek, Houston’s athletic director at the time and now athletic director at Arkansas, responded to the Kiffin report with a clever tweet: A photo of black smoke billowing from the famed Sistine Chapel chimney. Black smoke indicates that the papal conclave has yet to choose a new pope.
Houston didn’t anoint Kiffin or Riley. And had Riley kept his name in the search, the job likely would’ve still fallen to Applewhite, according to a source.
Houston had seen Art Briles, Kevin Sumlin and Herman use the program as a trampoline to Power Five jobs.
Tilman Fertitta, chairman of the Houston Board of Regents, had his hands on the search. This was almost a year before Fertitta would buy the Houston Rockets for $2.2 billion. Fertitta had indicated that the contract for Houston’s new coach would include a buyout that was going to be a big enough number that “you’re going to have to have won a national championship if they want you, because they’ll pay anything,” he told SportsRadio 610 in Houston.
Fertitta could not be reached for this story.
Riley and Kiffin were evaluated differently by Houston, but there was at least one commonality: The likeliness that either would leave the program in two to three years for a better job.
“I couldn’t tell you what happened in the process in terms of how far along it went,” Castiglione said, “I just know that (Riley) called Coach Stoops and Coach Stoops called me and said, ‘He’s staying.’ We obviously both were very happy.”
Much like Spurrier’s
advice to Stoops, Stoops’ advice to Riley — to wait for the right job — kept him at Oklahoma.
“He was very intentional about preparing himself the right way, thinking through what interviews would be like, thinking through all the various responsibilities of a head coach — the experiences he had, those new ones he wanted to gain,” Castiglione said of Riley. “Just basically growing as he had done at an accelerated rate as we all know for his age.”
Riley, 33 at the time, became the youngest head coach at the FBS level when Oklahoma turned the reins over to him on June 7, 2017.
When the Oakland Raiders hired Kiffin in 2007, he was 31. Kiffin was fired early on in his second season with the Raiders, but shortly thereafter began his college head coaching career.
The University of Tennessee hired Kiffin after the 2008 season. Like Riley, he was 33 at the time and the youngest coach in the FBS.
“It gets to a point when certain people are just more prepared to ascend to a big position at an earlier age than others,” Castiglione said.
Riley is still young enough in his career to make Kiffin, 43, seem old. Maybe it’s a byproduct of Kiffin’s stops from Oakland to Knoxville, from Knoxville to Southern Cal, then from USC to Alabama before washing up on the beaches of Boca Raton.
Off the field, Kiffin is one of the best Twitter follows in sports while Riley remains reserved. Kiffin is rebuilding his image while Riley is still establishing his.
On the field they’re prodigies of offense. Oklahoma has ranked among the top-four scoring offenses in college football each of the last three seasons. The Sooners were third last season, averaging 45.1 points per game. Florida Atlantic, in Kiffin’s first season, was eighth at 40.6 points per game.
“He’s done a great job offensively at all his different spots,” Riley said. “Obviously a guy that got a lot of responsibility at different places at a young age, so that’s always somebody that you know, guys like that that I’ve tried to look to and learn from.”
Riley and Kiffin have texted a few times. They’ll finally meet Saturday.