Lane Kiffin and Nick Saban weren’t always best friends at Alabama. (Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
Once upon a time, a very angry head coach named Nick Saban hired a very ambitious offensive coordinator at Alabama named Lane Kiffin.
At first, the two seemed like an odd pairing, a marriage of convenience at best. Saban was a legendary player struggling to adapt to the explosive, passive offenses that dominated college football. Kiffin was a talented offensive player whose career had hit rock bottom after he was fired from USC. The two won a national championship together in the 2015 season, but maintained their relationship was fine.
A new book shows that that’s not a problem: we didn’t need to be told in advance.
In an excerpt from their upcoming book “The Price: What It Takes to Win In College Football’s Era of Chaos” shared by AL.com, authors Armen Keteiian and Jon Talty offer a behind-the-scenes look at Alabama’s coaching staff during the Saban Kiffin era as part of a chapter on their mutual super-agent, Jimmy Sexton.
After the USC debacle, Sexton reportedly pressured Saban to give Kiffin a chance, a move the Alabama coach ultimately regretted.
From AL.com:
That moment came when Kiffin called Sexton to warn him that an angry Saban was coming on the phone. Why? The offensive coordinator told Sexton during the meeting, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
As expected, Saban’s not-so-cheery phone call came within minutes.
“You son of a bitch,” Saban told the agent, according to the book, “You convinced me to hire that narcissistic son of a bitch, Jimmy, and I’m firing you.”
To anyone with even a passing familiarity with the personalities of either coach, this shouldn’t come as a big surprise: Their (largely one-sided) animosity has been out in the open at times, and even after they parted ways, they made no attempt to quell the speculation.
With Saban being famously strict and Kiffin being famously abrasive, it was easy to see where problems could arise.
The book cites conversations between Saban and another former assistant, alleging that Kiffin constantly questioned Saban and was “the only assistant who refused to adopt Saban’s preferred approach.”
“Coach, there was never anything I couldn’t control,” a disgusted Saban told his assistant.
Saban and Kiffin worked together for three seasons — three seasons minus one game, to be exact — before Saban famously fired Kiffin before the 2017 College Football Playoff finals. Kiffin had accepted the head coaching job at Florida Atlantic, and Saban wanted Steve Sarkisian to run the offense rather than the outgoing coach.
Alabama lost that game, but you can bet Kiffin thought about it.
Saban suddenly retired in January, but Kiffin continues to coach in the SEC at Ole Miss. Saban has since joined the media as part of ESPN’s “College GameDay” crew, and we can only hope the show continues to cover the Rebels this season.