FAU coach Lane Kiffin reflects on early career
Owls coach reflects on what derailed him early and what the future holds.
In explaining what went amiss early in his football coaching career, he said it was too much fame, power and money.
Lane Kiffin the
— man with the mind that operates at warp speed on Saturday afternoons is searching for the words
— to explain what went amiss early in his career, but his brain has come to an unscheduled stop.
“There’s a name I’m trying to think of,” he says, grabbing the cell
phone off his desk to jog his mem-
ory. “The Nickelodeon Kids. Or Britney Spears ...”
With his thumb swiping upward through Spears’ Wikipedia bio, Kiffin
closes in: “... Life and career. Let’s go to early beginnings ...”
Paydirt. “Mickey Mouse Club.”
Yes. The coach who made the Florida Atlantic football team grow up overnight last season, the coach who sometimes sputtered in his own quest to grow up overnight while climbing the coaching ladder at record speeds, is comparing his career track to that of Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timber
lake & Co.
“So much, so early,” he says. “And some have done a good job handling it, some have had a lot of bumps and trials.”
Simply put, it was too much success, too much fame and too much money too soon, Kiffin says of himself.
“There’s a reason why you see many people that get a lot of success, a lot of money, power, fame early on and have a lot of struggles,” Kiffin says. “I mean, they make TV shows about them all the time.”
The plot for a docudrama of Kiffin would open like this: Age 31, becomes youngest head coach in NFL’s modern era, making $2 million a year with the Oakland Raiders ... until he’s abruptly fired ... and gets $14 million tossed his way by the University of Tennessee ...
On and on it would go, until now at 43 years old, Kiffin not only can fill the lead role but also offer a critic’s take on the blur flashing before his eyes. Today, Kiffin sounds more like a dad and less like the teenager whose dad just flipped him the keys to the Jag.
“As you get older, I think the things that you hear all the time that you just didn’t listen to when you were younger, now you start to get,” Kiffin says. “‘Be careful what you wish for.’ Those type of things. Or, ‘Money is the root of all evil. More money, more problems.’
“All those things that you hear all the time, when you’re younger, you don’t listen to those. Give me money, I’ll show you no problems, you know?”
Kiffin had money and problems, like the time he needed a police escort to hightail it out of Tennessee. In the coachspeak world of college football, he was politically incorrect, always enveloped by lightning — sometimes lassoing it in a bottle as an offensive guru, other times getting zapped as the lightning rod he can be.
“I don’t do things to try to change people’s image of myself,” he says. “... I’m in a different place than I have been before.”
True. He’s not in the NFL anymore. Not in Tuscaloosa or Knoxville or Southern California, either. A year ago, he left college football’s preeminent program, Alabama, for, of all places, Boca Raton.
Imagine that: one of the bestknown faces in college football landing in the place where nobody knew his face.
“It’s very different,” he says.
Lane Train gets career back on track in Boca
So yes, the locale has changed, but so too have the coach and the program. Talk about so much, so soon: FAU, which had won nine games the previous three seasons combined, was 11-3 last season and won the Conference USA championship. It carved its way into some preseason Top 25 rankings this year despite an unsettled quarterback situation, a testament, it would seem, to the man running the show.
A crushing 63-14 loss at Oklahoma last weekend silenced that talk, but Saturday’s home opener against Air Force offers a chance for the Lane Train to start chugging again. With 10 starters returning on defense, it’s easy to imagine the Owls enjoying another successful run. Question is, would that be the last stop in Boca Raton for the Lane Train?
“I think he’s kind of found ‘home’ in a sense,” says Matt Leinart, an analyst for Fox Sports who was a Heisman-winning quarterback at USC when Kiffin was the offensive coordinator. “Lane has kind of always been unpredictable. Obviously in his coaching career, he’s been a lot of places, had a lot of success, has had some places where he hasn’t been as successful. But in just talking to him, I think he loves the thought and the challenge of building a program. And that’s exactly what he did there in just one year. To have the season that he had, and where the program was prior to that, a handful of years, it’s really remarkable.”
Maybe Kiffin transformed FAU. Maybe FAU transformed Kiffin.
“It just shows the progress he’s made and the maturity that he’s been through in all of his stops,” Leinart said. “Because he’s taken his lumps and he’s taken a lot of criticism, but I know from the few conversations we’ve had he loves it there.”
Until now, every career move Kiffin made was another rung up the coaching ladder.
“I was always thinking, ‘OK, how fast can I keep moving up? How fast can I make the most money? How fast can I get to be the youngest head coach?’ Which, ironically, I did,” he says.
Five wins in 1¼ seasons with the Raiders didn’t cut it for owner Al Davis, who called a news conference to go off on a bizarre rant about what a mistake it was to hire Kiffin in the first place. The one thing Davis couldn’t dispute is that the Raiders’ offense at least had a pulse with Kiffin. Of course it did. If you chart the beforeand-after impact his hiring has had on virtually every team he has coached, you’ll draw arrows pointed toward the clouds.
But it’s one thing to be offensive, another to be, well, offensive. Kiffin was described as the “drama king” of college football by one writer and as someone who can “come off as a jerk sometimes” by a coach. The coach happens to be his brother, Chris, although it was said a decade ago, when Chris was hopeful Lane would change.
“I don’t think I did horrible at it,” Lane says of his younger self. “But I didn’t do it as well as I could have.”
For fans wanting to see the humble side of Lane Kiffin, there it is.
“Understanding,” he says. “Not letting that go to your head. Your priorities get out of whack, because (at that time), football had become more important than anything — family, faith.”
Ego is the enemy, but not Nick Saban
Kiffin now recognizes football was light years ahead of family. Though now divorced, he has two daughters and a son. But during the season, he used to head to the office on Sundays and return home on Thursdays, sleeping on a couch in his office in the interim.
It was a source of pride, getting by on five hours’ sleep. Then, anyway. Now, he loves to talk about “Ego is the Enemy,” a book by Ryan Holiday, and if he senses you’re getting its message about perspective, there’s a good chance the book will pop up in your mailbox.
Faith also has crept up more regularly in his public comments, and he even took players to church to hear a sermon on struggles. Sainthood remains as attainable as a fourth-and-30, such is Kiffin’s devilish inability to resist poking fun at Nick Saban, his former boss at Alabama. It was Saban who famously shoved Kiffin out the door during Kiffin’s transition period, insisting that his offensive coordinator was focusing too much on FAU and not enough on the Crimson Tide’s national championship showdown against Clemson. Alabama lost 35-31. We’ll never know if, with Saban nipping at his heels on the sideline all night, Kiffin could have produced a different result.
Harsh feelings? Fat chance. Step into Kiffin’s office and you’re blinded by cases of championship rings lining the front edge of his desk, many with Alabama’s iconic capital ‘A.’ Never wear ’em, Kiffin says. But they impress recruits.
“I find that funny,” he says. “Coaches wear them all the time and they’re so gaudy and big. People that know me, the last thing I want is attention on me when I’m out of the building anyway.” As for feelings toward Saban? “Very positive,” Kiffin says. So why the needling?
“I’m not needling him, because he doesn’t have Twitter,” Kiffin says. “He doesn’t see Twitter. So everyone thinks I’m needling him like he’s reading it. He doesn’t even know that that’s happening. He doesn’t know what Twitter is.”
The method to this madness, Kiffin explains, is to make FAU relevant. You do that by winning (check). You do that by calling attention to yourself off the field (check).
“A year ago, you weren’t here,” he tells a reporter. “Sports Illustrated wasn’t here. Now we have eight people here. We only had like four, I think, last year. So we’ve come a long ways.”
At last, a hint of that Kiffin sarcasm/humor the college football world loves and loathes. After the beatdown by the Sooners last Saturday, Kiffin sat before the microphones and deadpanned, “Did you guys enjoy that preseason game? It didn’t really count, right?”
When some of his players used the phrase “Bama South,” Kiffin did not recoil to slay overconfidence. He retweeted it. If going against the grain grates on some, that’s their problem.
“I laugh when people say, ‘Oh, man, why does he put that on Twitter? Doesn’t he know another athletic director or another president isn’t going to like that he made a joke on Twitter?’” Kiffin says. “I’m like, ‘I don’t work for them. I know I’m different. I just don’t understand trying to please the people that I don’t work for versus the people I work for.’ Our president wants our football team to draw a lot of attention to the school. That’s why he hired us. Out-of-state applications are up 40 percent — that’s his quote. He said, ‘And we didn’t change one thing except hiring Lane Kiffin.’”
As the school has learned to embrace Kiffin, Kiffin has begun embracing South Florida. He wishes attendance would improve but doesn’t mind that he can go unnoticed at the grocery store, have a peaceful workout at the gym or spend a quiet afternoon at the Boca Beach Club.
“I enjoy it here from a lifestyle standpoint of house on the water, 10 minutes away, great weather,” he says. In the offseason, he’ll take the boat out.
“I fish well — if I bring someone that knows how to fish a lot better than myself,” he says.
Alas, there’s only a small window for such activity. In his first season, Kiffin took an offense averaging 26.4 points per game and transformed it into a 40.6point juggernaut. Yardage rose from 398.6 per game to 498.2 thanks to what former running back Buddy Howell, who had a failed tryout with the Dolphins, describes as the courage to call anything anywhere at any time.
Before he was the Dolphins’ 2018 first-round draft pick, Minkah Fitzpatrick led Alabama’s secondary and had to contend with Kiffin’s unorthodox play-calling in practice.
“It’ll be out of nowhere, just something new,” Fitzpatrick says. “It’ll catch you on your toes.”
Kiffin can see the future, says it’s bright for FAU
Kiffin believes he sees things. Not as they happen. Before they happen.
One of the most-renowned plays in Leinart’s career was a fourthand-9 pass at Notre Dame in 2005. The play went for 61 yards in a dramatic 34-31 victory. Seconds before the play, Kiffin, then USC’s new, 30-year-old offensive coordinator, reminded everyone in the headsets that Leinart should call an audible if the opportunity presented itself. USC averaged 49.1 points per game that year. Likewise, before Alabama’s game against Florida in 2014, Kiffin told running back Kenyan Drake if he split out wide and was shadowed by a linebacker, six points were in the bank. Eighty-seven yards later, they were.
“I didn’t know we were going to run it on the first play,” says Drake, now the Dolphins’ featured back. “As soon as I ran the route, he already had his hands up, knowing it was a touchdown.”
Kiffin: “I think people just have gifts in certain areas and I think that God gave me a gift to see things slow. You never hear people talk about coaches. You hear people talk about players: ‘The game slows down.’ I’m not comparing myself to Tom Brady, but you always hear the game slows down for the Tom Bradys, the Joe Montanas.”
Kiffin credits his father, Monte, best known as architect of the Tampa Bay Bucs’ defenses who now serves as Lane’s defensive analyst. Growing up, Lane would watch “Monday Night Football” with his dad, asking questions.
“How do you get better than to be raised in a house with Monte Kiffin, then basically you grew up in the profession, your head coach was Pete Carroll and then you become a head coach, then go back to being an assistant coach and it’s Nick Saban?” Kiffin says.
As in-your-face as his father was running defenses, Lane, a former high school and college quarterback, is on offense. Sitting at his desk, he points to a binder on the shelf called Championship Analytics. It’s a weekly publication illustrating how games aren’t called as aggressively as they should be. He attributes that to the tenor of postgame news conferences, where gambles are judged within the prism of whether a team has won or lost, not whether the risks made sense at the time.
“It’s not that most coaches coach not to lose,” Kiffin says. “They coach not to get criticized.”
Criticized as much as he has been, Kiffin is more concerned with creating an atmosphere for success. He loves going for it on fourth down.
“People perform better when they feel that their boss has confidence in them,” he says.
So what’s not to like? Volunteers fans, who swear Rocky Top will always be home sweet home to them, point to Kiffin bolting after one year (at least Saban stuck with the Dolphins for two). It’s Kiffin’s public spats with coaches Urban Meyer and Steve Spurrier. It’s once offering a scholarship to a seventh-grader. Or getting left behind by Alabama team buses after more than one game — hence the “drama king” label.
A recent anonymous, unscientific poll of athletic directors indicated Kiffin remains radioactive. Maybe so, but all it takes is one big-name school waving a massive check to raise questions about how much Kiffin really is married to that waterfront home or the great fishing the local scene affords, whether he’s casting from his boat or trying to lure recruits.
“Just knowing Lane’s journey to FAU, I wouldn’t be surprised either way,” Leinart says. “But I also wouldn’t be surprised if he stays there and really tries to build up the program.”
Kiffin: “How do I really feel? I could be totally happy if you sat here and told me, ‘OK, 10 years from now, we won’t be in this building — we’ll be in the new building — and I’m still here.’
“If I am here in 10 years, I’m picturing that Florida Atlantic is not what it is today. Just like a lot of these other schools, they keep moving up. I don’t picture that Florida Atlantic’s in this conference. I picture it in a different conference and I picture that we’re a perennial Top 25 program.”
Kiffin won’t say which conference interests him, but no matter. FAU romantics can dream that this is simply the start of a beautiful relationship. Kiffin’s critics have a distant relative of their “I’m not going to be the Alabama coach” quote in the event he soon leaves.
Lane Kiffin goes on. With plenty of money. Plenty of fame.
Still searching for more success.