New book details Lane Kiffin’s split with Alabama, reported attempt to sabotage Ole Miss
When he was Alabama’s offensive coordinator from 2014-16, LSU coach Lane Kiffin butted heads with Nick Saban, womanized at local bars and angled for a different head coaching gig than the one he ultimately used as a launchpad for his return to prominence, according to one excerpt from a forthcoming book.
And when Kiffin was only a few months into his tenure at LSU, the book said, he also fed Clemson coach Dabo Swinney information to help him pursue a tampering charge against Ole Miss over a transfer linebacker.
Those two moments of Kiffin’s rollercoaster career are detailed in “Lane Being Lane: The Story of Lane Kiffin, College Football’s Agent of Chaos.” Vanity Fair and CBS Sports each published excerpts of the biography, which was written by reporter John Talty, on Wednesday — three days before Kiffin kicks off his tenure at LSU’s head coach with a home game against Clemson (6:30 p.m., ABC).
“He can’t handle Ole Miss being successful,” one unnamed source told Talty. “(Ole Miss coach) Pete (Golding) said, ‘They better be careful, I know where every body is buried.’‘”
The Vanity Fair excerpt covers Kiffin rocky exit from Alabama. When the two parties split just days before the 2016 national championship game, they framed it publicly as a “mutual decision” that would allow Kiffin to focus on his new responsibilities as Florida Atlantic’s head coach.
But “everyone involved” with the Crimson Tide, the book says, knew that Kiffin’s departure was more acrimonious. The future LSU head coach had simply caused too many problems for the program — both on and off the field — and “it was clear” near the end of the 2016 season that he needed to “seek employment elsewhere.”
“You’ve got to keep Lane away from the girls that are in college,” Saban once told a team staffer, according to one former coach who was interviewed for the book. “Just keep him away from the sorority girls. Make sure they’ve graduated college or are working a job.”
At the time, Kiffin was separated from his now ex-wife, Layla, and their three kids. He wasn’t sober, mindful and health-conscious like he is now. Instead, according to the book, Kiffin would frequent Tuscaloosa-area bars such as Innisfree Irish Pub — to the point where an Alabama staffer once had to retrieve a golf cart he had left parked there the night before. One friend who spoke to Talty worried Kiffin would “drink himself to death.”
Kiffin wasn’t the first Alabama assistant to visit bars after games, the book said, and he wouldn’t be the last.
But one Innisfree employee quoted in the excerpt said he was “visible publicly in a time where Alabama coaches were not visible publicly.”
“The other coaches just never went out,” the employee said, “and Lane was definitely different in that aspect. Lane was going to be in public at times, sometimes at very odd times during the season.”
Wrote Talty: “He was lonely without his family, and he was facing intense pressure working for a man he couldn’t understand.”
Kiffin once told ESPN’s Pete Thamel that he measures time on Saban’s staff in dog years: “Three years is like 21.” He also told reporters in a news conference that he couldn’t recall a “happy moment” working with Saban. Kiffin could only remember, he said, “the ass-chewings.”
Talty wrote that Saban was “quite upset” about those comments. Then he grew “disturbed” by something he noticed while he was watching film of Alabama’s 2016 College Football Playoff semifinal win over Washington: Kiffin had called plays the Crimson Tide hadn’t even practiced. The move, according to the book, was a “party trick” of sorts for the offensive whiz.
It also might’ve been Saban’s last straw. Kiffin was fired the following week, left to focus solely on FAU.
But that job wasn’t his first choice, Talty wrote. Kiffin preferred Houston’s head coaching job — a gig that was given to the Cougars’ then-offensive coordinator instead. The book says that Kiffin thought his super-agent, CAA’s Jimmy Sexton, “screwed” him out of the Houston job and “pulled the strings” so he’d wind up at FAU.
Kiffin and Sexton, according to Talty’s reporting, have a “father-son” relationship that “went far beyond the typical agent and client dynamic.” Sexton also represents Saban and a slew of other big-name coaches.
“He’s Jimmy’s golden boy,” said one unnamed source quote in the book. “Jimmy is really responsible for Lane Kiffin’s rehabilitation.”
Kiffin has since cut out alcohol, reconciled with his family and taken up hot yoga. Now he’s slimmer, trimmer, and he says even off social media — something he used frequently during his six-year tenure at Ole Miss.
That chapter of Kiffin’s career will also be featured in Talty’s book, which goes on sale four days before LSU’s new coach makes his highly anticipated return to Oxford, Mississippi, on Sept. 19.