You had a pretty good Thanksgiving weekend: Ate some pumpkin pie. Took the kids to the parade. Managed to get through a visit with your family without arguing about politics.
Lane Kiffin? He coached his ascendant college football team to its fifth-straight victory, its 11th of the season, making history for his employer and putting the team firmly on the path to a possible national championship. He was rewarded with a seven-year contract worth a reported $100 million and private-jet flights hopscotching the Deep South. He had an awesome Thanksgiving weekend. Except for the part where he made himself a poster boy for the big-money mercenary mess that is elite college football.
Kiffin’s on-field triumph came in the service of his then employer, the University of Mississippi. At the same time, Kiffin was very publicly negotiating a very rich deal to ditch Ole Miss for an arch-rival, Louisiana State University. The melodrama of his ship-jumping ensnared everyone from powerhouse talent agency CAA to ESPN, the dominant college football broadcasting network.
“Most coaches have a backbone,” a veteran coach who has worked at LSU and other elite football programs says. “Most coaches would say, ‘I’ve devoted six years of my life to this, I’ve created a monster, and I can keep it going because Ole Miss is willing to spend the money it takes.’ Most coaches have a conscience. But Lane Kiffin is not that guy.”
The saga began in October, when two major football schools, LSU and Florida, both fired their underperforming coaches. Kiffin, 50, instantly became the hottest candidate for each job. Each school was hungry for Kiffin’s mastery of offensive football strategy and his recruiting skills. (His father, Monte Kiffin, was also a football coach, and Monte moved his family 17 times, usually voluntarily and usually in pursuit of what seemed to be a better job.) But Kiffin is also a master of bitter exits.
Kiffin lasted one year as coach of the NFL’s Oakland Raiders. In 2008, the team’s legendarily roguish owner, Al Davis, conducted a two-hour press conference explaining Kiffin’s firing, during which Davis blistered Kiffin as a “flat-out liar” who “conned me, like he conned all you people.”
Kiffin quickly rebounded, becoming head coach at the University of Tennessee, where he professed his love for the Volunteers—then quit after one season to take his “dream job” as head coach at USC. Tennessee students set fires when the news broke; one urinated on a T-shirt with Kiffin’s photo before torching it. Barely one month into his fourth season at USC, after a road game in which Arizona State demolished the Trojans 62-41, Kiffin was met by school officials when the team plane landed at about 3 a.m. in Los Angeles and summarily fired before he’d left the airport. He was hired as offensive coordinator at Alabama in 2014, but suddenly departed one week before the national championship game in 2017, apparently because head coach Nick Saban believed Kiffin was too distracted by the new job he’d just taken as head coach at Florida Atlantic University. (An official statement at the time said the decision was “mutual.”)
