From the Athletic
Inside Lane Kiffin’s Tennessee-to-USC divorce: ‘All hell broke loose’ when the Trojans sought to re-create Pete Carroll
https://theathletic.com/2887843/202...eate-pete-carroll/?source=user_shared_article
Editor’s note: This story is part of the Secrets of the Coaching Carousel series exploring unique aspects of college football coaching changes and more.
“You’re not gonna believe this!” Mike Hamilton said over the phone to his second-in-command in the Tennessee athletic department, on what would prove to be one of the wildest days in Volunteers football history.
David Blackburn, Tennessee’s senior associate athletic director, did, in fact, not believe what his boss had just told him on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-January 2010. Lane Kiffin, the Vols’ 34-year-old rookie head coach, might be bolting Knoxville for the USC head coaching job?
The same Lane Kiffin who had generated all sorts of buzz for the Tennessee football program, invigorated the Vols fan base, pissed off rival SEC coaches and the conference’s commissioner, and, along with his staff, had committed a dozen NCAA violations?
“Mike, no way,” Blackburn replied. But Hamilton insisted that there was a real possibility of Kiffin, the most polarizing figure in coaching at the time, replacing his mentor Pete Carroll at USC.
“Keep your phone with you,” Hamilton said. “This thing could happen this evening.”
Blackburn did, and his phone rang a few minutes later. It was Kiffin, telling Blackburn, who had become a trusted advisor to the young head coach in what had been a tumultuous year, to gather up the Vols staff as quickly as possible. “He wanted to have a team meeting,” Blackburn recalled to The Athletic this week.
As soon as Blackburn hung up with Kiffin, his phone rang again. It was Hamilton.
“Lane’s taking the job.”
Blackburn called Kiffin back. Kiffin matter-of-factly acknowledged he was taking the Trojans job.
Blackburn frantically tried to help Kiffin, getting him back from Orlando where he was at the American Football Coaches convention on Tennessee’s private plane while also rounding up the team. Hamilton, who was on the other side of the country visiting a Vols donor, scrambled to get a flight back to Knoxville.
“D.B. (Blackburn) came to me and goes, ‘You’re not gonna believe this. Lane just left for USC,’” said a former Tennessee staffer. “I was like, ‘What!?’ I was shocked. Nobody knew. The coaches had no clue.”
In the next two hours, word leaked of Kiffin taking the USC job. It made the ESPN BottomLine. Vol players were furious that that’s how they learned that their coach was leaving.
“We flew him back,” Blackburn said, “and then, all hell broke loose.”
The details of what happened in Knoxville on that chaotic evening of Jan. 12, 2010, where Kiffin, after announcing “I really believe that this is probably the only place I would have left here to go was Southern California,” had to barricade himself in his office until police escorted him home at 4 a.m. to avoid an enraged fanbase, have been outlined numerous times.
How Kiffin ended up getting the USC job after Pete Carroll left to become the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks coach is murkier tale. From conversations with numerous people who were at Tennessee and USC at the time, The Athletic has tried to sort out how college football’s most stunning hire of the 21st century came together.
Around dinnertime on the West Coast on Jan. 12, Kiffin began reaching out to some of his close friends in the USC community.
“It’s done. I’m coming,” Kiffin texted one buddy, who stepped outside a restaurant to call the coach.
“There’s no ****ing way,” Kiffin’s friend said.
“It’s done. Get ready,” Kiffin replied.
Another USC source close to Kiffin who had also gotten the good news text told The Athletic: “We were like, ‘What the ****?’ Literally, minds blown. That’s ****ing ridiculous-slash-awesome.’”
Kiffin’s name emerged after Oregon State’s Mike Riley, an ex-Trojan offensive coordinator, told USC he wasn’t interested.
“(USC athletic director) Mike Garrett was always a Mike Riley fan,” said a former Trojan athletic department staffer. Two other options with USC roots — Jeff Fisher, then the Tennessee Titans head coach, and Jack Del Rio, then the Jacksonville Jaguars head coach — also were considered, sources tell The Athletic.
Fisher had been pursued by USC for its coaching job two previous times and was approached about replacing Carroll, but again, the timing just wasn’t right. “The conversation didn’t last long,” Fisher told The Athletic. “I never interviewed. I was interested. I love Southern California and the program but I was committed to Tennessee and I still had one year left on my contract. If I didn’t have a year left on my contract, I would’ve gone out of my way to get it.”
Then, a dark horse quietly emerged. A candidate that even those close to the USC athletic director didn’t realize was in play.
“Mike Garrett worked in a really tight vertical,” said the former USC athletic department staffer.
Kiffin had spent six years at USC as an assistant, helping Carroll win two national titles. At 31, Kiffin was hired to become the coach of the Oakland Raiders, but he lasted a little more than one season, going 5-15. His hiring at Tennessee in November of 2008, at 33, made him the youngest head coach in the FBS.
He took over a Vols team that had gone 5-7 the previous year under longtime coach Phil Fulmer. Kiffin assembled an all-star coaching staff, headlined by his father, Monte, a revered defensive coach from the NFL, and ace recruiter and defensive line coach Ed Orgeron, his colleague from their days on Carroll’s staff at USC.
Kiffin provided a big jolt to Tennessee football. His brash personality rubbed a lot of his peers the wrong way, but it got recruits’ attention and also sparked a lot of his new players. He wasn’t shy about generating headlines — in fact, he seemed to relish making them. When Kiffin landed a touted receiver recruit from Florida, Nu’keese Richardson (who had been committed to the Gators), the Vols coach told a signing day crowd of supporters: “I’m gonna turn Florida in right here in front of you. While Nu’Keese was on campus, his phone kept ringing. One of the coaches says, ‘Who’s that?’ And he said, ‘Urban Meyer.’ … I love the fact that Urban had to cheat and still didn’t get him.”
But SEC commissioner Mike Slive said the phone call which Kiffin referred to wasn’t actually a violation of SEC or NCAA rules, and that Kiffin actually violated the Southeastern Conference Code of Ethics.
For all the bluster, Kiffin improved the Volunteers. Their record was only 7-6, but there were signs of growth. They blew out Georgia and Steve Spurrier’s South Carolina team and hung with defending national champion Florida, a 30-point favorite, after most thought Meyer would embarrass Tennessee. Then the Vols gave Nick Saban’s top-ranked Alabama all it could handle in Tuscaloosa before falling 12-10. Recruits were buying in. So were Tennessee fans.
And then came Jan. 12.
Garrett wanted to recreate what Carroll and his staff had built a decade earlier. His answer was to hire Kiffin and surround him with a heavyweight staff.
“I thought it was completely unrealistic when I heard that it was happening,” the former USC athletic department staffer said of Kiffin getting the job. “But then I realized it was a package deal, with Monte and Ed coming back with him. Then you had the influence of (Kiffin’s agent) Jimmy Sexton to make it happen. I don’t know how he does it but he does it. All those things combined made it work.
“Monte still had his fastball then. His name carried a ton of weight and there was a relationship between Monte and Mike Garrett. I know Mike really respected Monte.”
Lane Kiffin disputes that Sexton steered Garrett to broker the deal. “Mike never had one conversation with Jimmy,” said Kiffin. “(Garrett) hates agents.” According to Kiffin, it was former USC senior associate AD Daryl Gross — AD at Syracuse at the time — who got things going for him with the Trojans’ coaching search. Gross, a former New York Jets scout when Carroll was their defensive coordinator who later became a trusted aid to Garrett, was a big reason why USC ended up hiring Carroll.
Kiffin would bring his father, Monte, and former colleague, Ed Orgeron, back to Los Angeles. Photo: Stephen Dunn / Getty Images
The elder Kiffin had been a mentor to Pete Carroll. Orgeron had been Carroll’s right-hand man in helping USC become the top program in the country. He was the one holdover from the prior regime that Carroll retained when he got the job and had provided a counterbalance to the perpetually upbeat and boisterous head coach.
“Monte and (Sexton) worked that whole thing,” said the source. “Garrett had said, ‘If you don’t bring Orgeron with you, there’s no deal.’”
“Mike saw that Ed was tough on the kids, but they loved him,” said a USC source close to Garrett. “He was the discipline guy. He didn’t drink. He wasn’t one of the boys. (Legendary Trojan staffer) Marv Goux was the heart and soul of the place and Marv told me, ‘This guy (Orgeron) reminds me of me.’”
USC brass also wanted Kiffin to bring back former Trojans offensive coordinator Norm Chow. Chow coached Ty Detmer to the Heisman Trophy at BYU; he also groomed Phillip Rivers into a star at NC State. Chow helped transform a struggling Carson Palmer into a Heisman winner and developed Matt Leinart into another Heisman guy.
Chow left USC for the Tennessee Titans before returning to college football across town as UCLA’s offensive coordinator. There had been rumors of friction between Chow and Kiffin toward the end of their time together with the Trojans, but Kiffin did call Chow about a reunion.
“It was never a negative deal,” Chow told The Athletic. “People have made it out a lot worse than it was. He was very respectful. We used to drive to work together.
“I’ll never forget this one time, he said, ‘Why are you so uptight all the time?’ I said, ‘Lane, I do this for a living. I have to feed my family, and I’m paying a mortgage.’ He said, ‘I don’t have to work a day in my life. I coach just for fun.’ That’s why he can coach the way he does — all loosey-goosey, says a lot of crazy stuff. I just have to chuckle. That’s him.”
Chow was visiting a family friend in a Florida hospital when he received Kiffin’s call. “He was just making the call, I think, because he was told to make the call. I wasn’t about to leave.
“As I look back, maybe it would’ve worked out. I would still be in his way, and I don’t need all that stuff. I just did my own deal. Lane didn’t need me. He could just say, ‘Hey, Norm didn’t want to come,’ and he wouldn’t be lying.”
Orgeron, meanwhile, was back home in Louisiana with his family when Kiffin called him from Orlando around 1 p.m. that day.
Kiffin: “Hey, we got the USC job?”
Orgeron: “What?”
Kiffin: “You want to come?”
Orgeron: “What?”
Orgeron thought it was a no-brainer for him to return to USC. He’d always wanted to go back. He was on a plane from New Orleans to Los Angeles by 5 p.m. Orgeron headed immediately to Carroll’s beach house to meet his son, Brennan Carroll, who had been the Trojans’ tight ends coach to talk about recruiting and to get up to speed on the roster. What none of them knew was that the program was about to walk right into a haymaker.
Six months after Kiffin was hired, in June 2010, the NCAA hit USC with a lack of institutional control charge stemming from its investigation into former star running back Reggie Bush. USC was punished with, among other things, a two-year postseason ban and had to surrender 30 scholarships over a three-year span. All of the program’s juniors and seniors were free to transfer out without any penalty. It was a series of penalties that would ultimately cripple the Trojans’ depth, as well as impact how they practiced and prepared for games.
“The way SC got hit with those penalties and the way we responded and the whole thing wasn’t nearly as what it had been portrayed to him,” said the former USC athletic department staffer. “I think we were all under the same impression: That we were gonna somehow get a slap in the wrist.”
Kiffin told The Athletic that the moment it sunk in that the USC job was going to be much different than what he anticipated was that day, two months after his first spring ball there, when the NCAA’s penalties were revealed.
“It was basically everything but the death penalty,” he said. “I remember everyone saying, including the ‘LA Times’, get ready for half-empty stadiums. Get ready for three, four-win seasons. Like what had happened at Miami when this had happened (in the mid-90s). We went 10-2 and everybody forgot about that.”
That 10-2 season, which included a win over No. 4 Oregon at Autzen Stadium that was followed by a 50-0 win over arch-rival UCLA, came in Kiffin’s second year, in 2011 (the Trojans finished 8-5 in his first season). The Trojans came into the next season ranked preseason No. 1. They opened that season 6-1 but wore down and then fell apart, losing five of their final six games. The Trojans finished the season unranked. And along the way, there was more than his share of drama too.
“I still, in typical me fashion, thought I could overcome them,” Kiffin said, “but when I started seeing practice impact and gameday scholarship numbers like an NFL team was like, this is set up this way for a reason. You’re supposed to lose. Certainly not go 28-15, which is why it was so hard to deal with being not only fired, but for years people, especially ADs, thought you were a bad head coach. That’s hard to accept when you never had (anything) close to fair shot.”
For Kiffin, it wasn’t just a challenge to build back professionally but personally. In 2013, Kiffin was fired, infamously, on the tarmac at LAX after getting hammered by Arizona State to fall to 3-2. The following year, in 2014, he relocated back to SEC country, becoming the offensive coordinator for Nick Saban at Alabama, where he helped overhaul the Tide’s offensive system — and the coach who had gone from prodigy to punchline began to rebuild his career.
“I don’t sit there and say we should’ve stayed at Tennessee,” Kiffin told The Athletic. Photo: Joe Murphy / Getty Images)
Moving to the other side of the country, away from his family and three young children, to try and get a head coaching job again after he felt like the USC job shouldn’t have been taken away from him (given the sanctions Kiffin faced) was “hard to deal with,” he said.
“Six years of your life just to get a Power 5 job, because everyone thought you must be a horrible head coach, instead of a coach that went 10-2 in the middle of those penalties somehow,” he said.
This weekend, Kiffin, now 46, heads back to Knoxville. His coaching stock is surging again. He had a wildly successful three-year run at FAU and parlayed that into another SEC head coaching gig. In his second season at Ole Miss, his team is 4-1 and has one of the most explosive offenses in the country.
Asked when he realized he made a mistake in leaving Tennessee for USC, Kiffin said he doesn’t think of it that way because he didn’t know what was going to happen.
“We went there and were told by the powers there that there was this Reggie Bush situation and there was nothing to it. Worst-case scenario: slap on the wrist. Then all of a sudden, we go there, put a staff together, start recruiting and we get a two-year bowl ban, lost 30 scholarships.
“(It’s) well-known, but think about this: You go into your first year and all your juniors and seniors can transfer with no penalty and they can just leave. They’re not gonna be able to play in a bowl game for two years, so it’s hard to keep ‘em. It’s hard to recruit when kids can’t go play in bowl games. And we signed the No. 1 class in the country, loading up before the numbers took their hit.
“There was no way to know (the sanctions were coming). So I don’t sit there and say we should’ve stayed at Tennessee. I like to live in the positive and say, had those numbers not happened, it would’ve been a totally different story of results on the field. I know that.”
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Christian Petersen, Harry How / Getty)
What did you think of this story?
MEH
SOLID
Inside Lane Kiffin’s Tennessee-to-USC divorce: ‘All hell broke loose’ when the Trojans sought to re-create Pete Carroll
https://theathletic.com/2887843/202...eate-pete-carroll/?source=user_shared_article
Editor’s note: This story is part of the Secrets of the Coaching Carousel series exploring unique aspects of college football coaching changes and more.
“You’re not gonna believe this!” Mike Hamilton said over the phone to his second-in-command in the Tennessee athletic department, on what would prove to be one of the wildest days in Volunteers football history.
David Blackburn, Tennessee’s senior associate athletic director, did, in fact, not believe what his boss had just told him on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-January 2010. Lane Kiffin, the Vols’ 34-year-old rookie head coach, might be bolting Knoxville for the USC head coaching job?
The same Lane Kiffin who had generated all sorts of buzz for the Tennessee football program, invigorated the Vols fan base, pissed off rival SEC coaches and the conference’s commissioner, and, along with his staff, had committed a dozen NCAA violations?
“Mike, no way,” Blackburn replied. But Hamilton insisted that there was a real possibility of Kiffin, the most polarizing figure in coaching at the time, replacing his mentor Pete Carroll at USC.
“Keep your phone with you,” Hamilton said. “This thing could happen this evening.”
Blackburn did, and his phone rang a few minutes later. It was Kiffin, telling Blackburn, who had become a trusted advisor to the young head coach in what had been a tumultuous year, to gather up the Vols staff as quickly as possible. “He wanted to have a team meeting,” Blackburn recalled to The Athletic this week.
As soon as Blackburn hung up with Kiffin, his phone rang again. It was Hamilton.
“Lane’s taking the job.”
Blackburn called Kiffin back. Kiffin matter-of-factly acknowledged he was taking the Trojans job.
Blackburn frantically tried to help Kiffin, getting him back from Orlando where he was at the American Football Coaches convention on Tennessee’s private plane while also rounding up the team. Hamilton, who was on the other side of the country visiting a Vols donor, scrambled to get a flight back to Knoxville.
“D.B. (Blackburn) came to me and goes, ‘You’re not gonna believe this. Lane just left for USC,’” said a former Tennessee staffer. “I was like, ‘What!?’ I was shocked. Nobody knew. The coaches had no clue.”
In the next two hours, word leaked of Kiffin taking the USC job. It made the ESPN BottomLine. Vol players were furious that that’s how they learned that their coach was leaving.
“We flew him back,” Blackburn said, “and then, all hell broke loose.”
The details of what happened in Knoxville on that chaotic evening of Jan. 12, 2010, where Kiffin, after announcing “I really believe that this is probably the only place I would have left here to go was Southern California,” had to barricade himself in his office until police escorted him home at 4 a.m. to avoid an enraged fanbase, have been outlined numerous times.
How Kiffin ended up getting the USC job after Pete Carroll left to become the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks coach is murkier tale. From conversations with numerous people who were at Tennessee and USC at the time, The Athletic has tried to sort out how college football’s most stunning hire of the 21st century came together.
Around dinnertime on the West Coast on Jan. 12, Kiffin began reaching out to some of his close friends in the USC community.
“It’s done. I’m coming,” Kiffin texted one buddy, who stepped outside a restaurant to call the coach.
“There’s no ****ing way,” Kiffin’s friend said.
“It’s done. Get ready,” Kiffin replied.
Another USC source close to Kiffin who had also gotten the good news text told The Athletic: “We were like, ‘What the ****?’ Literally, minds blown. That’s ****ing ridiculous-slash-awesome.’”
Kiffin’s name emerged after Oregon State’s Mike Riley, an ex-Trojan offensive coordinator, told USC he wasn’t interested.
“(USC athletic director) Mike Garrett was always a Mike Riley fan,” said a former Trojan athletic department staffer. Two other options with USC roots — Jeff Fisher, then the Tennessee Titans head coach, and Jack Del Rio, then the Jacksonville Jaguars head coach — also were considered, sources tell The Athletic.
Fisher had been pursued by USC for its coaching job two previous times and was approached about replacing Carroll, but again, the timing just wasn’t right. “The conversation didn’t last long,” Fisher told The Athletic. “I never interviewed. I was interested. I love Southern California and the program but I was committed to Tennessee and I still had one year left on my contract. If I didn’t have a year left on my contract, I would’ve gone out of my way to get it.”
Then, a dark horse quietly emerged. A candidate that even those close to the USC athletic director didn’t realize was in play.
“Mike Garrett worked in a really tight vertical,” said the former USC athletic department staffer.
Kiffin had spent six years at USC as an assistant, helping Carroll win two national titles. At 31, Kiffin was hired to become the coach of the Oakland Raiders, but he lasted a little more than one season, going 5-15. His hiring at Tennessee in November of 2008, at 33, made him the youngest head coach in the FBS.
He took over a Vols team that had gone 5-7 the previous year under longtime coach Phil Fulmer. Kiffin assembled an all-star coaching staff, headlined by his father, Monte, a revered defensive coach from the NFL, and ace recruiter and defensive line coach Ed Orgeron, his colleague from their days on Carroll’s staff at USC.
Kiffin provided a big jolt to Tennessee football. His brash personality rubbed a lot of his peers the wrong way, but it got recruits’ attention and also sparked a lot of his new players. He wasn’t shy about generating headlines — in fact, he seemed to relish making them. When Kiffin landed a touted receiver recruit from Florida, Nu’keese Richardson (who had been committed to the Gators), the Vols coach told a signing day crowd of supporters: “I’m gonna turn Florida in right here in front of you. While Nu’Keese was on campus, his phone kept ringing. One of the coaches says, ‘Who’s that?’ And he said, ‘Urban Meyer.’ … I love the fact that Urban had to cheat and still didn’t get him.”
But SEC commissioner Mike Slive said the phone call which Kiffin referred to wasn’t actually a violation of SEC or NCAA rules, and that Kiffin actually violated the Southeastern Conference Code of Ethics.
For all the bluster, Kiffin improved the Volunteers. Their record was only 7-6, but there were signs of growth. They blew out Georgia and Steve Spurrier’s South Carolina team and hung with defending national champion Florida, a 30-point favorite, after most thought Meyer would embarrass Tennessee. Then the Vols gave Nick Saban’s top-ranked Alabama all it could handle in Tuscaloosa before falling 12-10. Recruits were buying in. So were Tennessee fans.
And then came Jan. 12.
Garrett wanted to recreate what Carroll and his staff had built a decade earlier. His answer was to hire Kiffin and surround him with a heavyweight staff.
“I thought it was completely unrealistic when I heard that it was happening,” the former USC athletic department staffer said of Kiffin getting the job. “But then I realized it was a package deal, with Monte and Ed coming back with him. Then you had the influence of (Kiffin’s agent) Jimmy Sexton to make it happen. I don’t know how he does it but he does it. All those things combined made it work.
“Monte still had his fastball then. His name carried a ton of weight and there was a relationship between Monte and Mike Garrett. I know Mike really respected Monte.”
Lane Kiffin disputes that Sexton steered Garrett to broker the deal. “Mike never had one conversation with Jimmy,” said Kiffin. “(Garrett) hates agents.” According to Kiffin, it was former USC senior associate AD Daryl Gross — AD at Syracuse at the time — who got things going for him with the Trojans’ coaching search. Gross, a former New York Jets scout when Carroll was their defensive coordinator who later became a trusted aid to Garrett, was a big reason why USC ended up hiring Carroll.
Kiffin would bring his father, Monte, and former colleague, Ed Orgeron, back to Los Angeles. Photo: Stephen Dunn / Getty Images
The elder Kiffin had been a mentor to Pete Carroll. Orgeron had been Carroll’s right-hand man in helping USC become the top program in the country. He was the one holdover from the prior regime that Carroll retained when he got the job and had provided a counterbalance to the perpetually upbeat and boisterous head coach.
“Monte and (Sexton) worked that whole thing,” said the source. “Garrett had said, ‘If you don’t bring Orgeron with you, there’s no deal.’”
“Mike saw that Ed was tough on the kids, but they loved him,” said a USC source close to Garrett. “He was the discipline guy. He didn’t drink. He wasn’t one of the boys. (Legendary Trojan staffer) Marv Goux was the heart and soul of the place and Marv told me, ‘This guy (Orgeron) reminds me of me.’”
USC brass also wanted Kiffin to bring back former Trojans offensive coordinator Norm Chow. Chow coached Ty Detmer to the Heisman Trophy at BYU; he also groomed Phillip Rivers into a star at NC State. Chow helped transform a struggling Carson Palmer into a Heisman winner and developed Matt Leinart into another Heisman guy.
Chow left USC for the Tennessee Titans before returning to college football across town as UCLA’s offensive coordinator. There had been rumors of friction between Chow and Kiffin toward the end of their time together with the Trojans, but Kiffin did call Chow about a reunion.
“It was never a negative deal,” Chow told The Athletic. “People have made it out a lot worse than it was. He was very respectful. We used to drive to work together.
“I’ll never forget this one time, he said, ‘Why are you so uptight all the time?’ I said, ‘Lane, I do this for a living. I have to feed my family, and I’m paying a mortgage.’ He said, ‘I don’t have to work a day in my life. I coach just for fun.’ That’s why he can coach the way he does — all loosey-goosey, says a lot of crazy stuff. I just have to chuckle. That’s him.”
Chow was visiting a family friend in a Florida hospital when he received Kiffin’s call. “He was just making the call, I think, because he was told to make the call. I wasn’t about to leave.
“As I look back, maybe it would’ve worked out. I would still be in his way, and I don’t need all that stuff. I just did my own deal. Lane didn’t need me. He could just say, ‘Hey, Norm didn’t want to come,’ and he wouldn’t be lying.”
Orgeron, meanwhile, was back home in Louisiana with his family when Kiffin called him from Orlando around 1 p.m. that day.
Kiffin: “Hey, we got the USC job?”
Orgeron: “What?”
Kiffin: “You want to come?”
Orgeron: “What?”
Orgeron thought it was a no-brainer for him to return to USC. He’d always wanted to go back. He was on a plane from New Orleans to Los Angeles by 5 p.m. Orgeron headed immediately to Carroll’s beach house to meet his son, Brennan Carroll, who had been the Trojans’ tight ends coach to talk about recruiting and to get up to speed on the roster. What none of them knew was that the program was about to walk right into a haymaker.
Six months after Kiffin was hired, in June 2010, the NCAA hit USC with a lack of institutional control charge stemming from its investigation into former star running back Reggie Bush. USC was punished with, among other things, a two-year postseason ban and had to surrender 30 scholarships over a three-year span. All of the program’s juniors and seniors were free to transfer out without any penalty. It was a series of penalties that would ultimately cripple the Trojans’ depth, as well as impact how they practiced and prepared for games.
“The way SC got hit with those penalties and the way we responded and the whole thing wasn’t nearly as what it had been portrayed to him,” said the former USC athletic department staffer. “I think we were all under the same impression: That we were gonna somehow get a slap in the wrist.”
Kiffin told The Athletic that the moment it sunk in that the USC job was going to be much different than what he anticipated was that day, two months after his first spring ball there, when the NCAA’s penalties were revealed.
“It was basically everything but the death penalty,” he said. “I remember everyone saying, including the ‘LA Times’, get ready for half-empty stadiums. Get ready for three, four-win seasons. Like what had happened at Miami when this had happened (in the mid-90s). We went 10-2 and everybody forgot about that.”
That 10-2 season, which included a win over No. 4 Oregon at Autzen Stadium that was followed by a 50-0 win over arch-rival UCLA, came in Kiffin’s second year, in 2011 (the Trojans finished 8-5 in his first season). The Trojans came into the next season ranked preseason No. 1. They opened that season 6-1 but wore down and then fell apart, losing five of their final six games. The Trojans finished the season unranked. And along the way, there was more than his share of drama too.
“I still, in typical me fashion, thought I could overcome them,” Kiffin said, “but when I started seeing practice impact and gameday scholarship numbers like an NFL team was like, this is set up this way for a reason. You’re supposed to lose. Certainly not go 28-15, which is why it was so hard to deal with being not only fired, but for years people, especially ADs, thought you were a bad head coach. That’s hard to accept when you never had (anything) close to fair shot.”
For Kiffin, it wasn’t just a challenge to build back professionally but personally. In 2013, Kiffin was fired, infamously, on the tarmac at LAX after getting hammered by Arizona State to fall to 3-2. The following year, in 2014, he relocated back to SEC country, becoming the offensive coordinator for Nick Saban at Alabama, where he helped overhaul the Tide’s offensive system — and the coach who had gone from prodigy to punchline began to rebuild his career.
“I don’t sit there and say we should’ve stayed at Tennessee,” Kiffin told The Athletic. Photo: Joe Murphy / Getty Images)
Moving to the other side of the country, away from his family and three young children, to try and get a head coaching job again after he felt like the USC job shouldn’t have been taken away from him (given the sanctions Kiffin faced) was “hard to deal with,” he said.
“Six years of your life just to get a Power 5 job, because everyone thought you must be a horrible head coach, instead of a coach that went 10-2 in the middle of those penalties somehow,” he said.
This weekend, Kiffin, now 46, heads back to Knoxville. His coaching stock is surging again. He had a wildly successful three-year run at FAU and parlayed that into another SEC head coaching gig. In his second season at Ole Miss, his team is 4-1 and has one of the most explosive offenses in the country.
Asked when he realized he made a mistake in leaving Tennessee for USC, Kiffin said he doesn’t think of it that way because he didn’t know what was going to happen.
“We went there and were told by the powers there that there was this Reggie Bush situation and there was nothing to it. Worst-case scenario: slap on the wrist. Then all of a sudden, we go there, put a staff together, start recruiting and we get a two-year bowl ban, lost 30 scholarships.
“(It’s) well-known, but think about this: You go into your first year and all your juniors and seniors can transfer with no penalty and they can just leave. They’re not gonna be able to play in a bowl game for two years, so it’s hard to keep ‘em. It’s hard to recruit when kids can’t go play in bowl games. And we signed the No. 1 class in the country, loading up before the numbers took their hit.
“There was no way to know (the sanctions were coming). So I don’t sit there and say we should’ve stayed at Tennessee. I like to live in the positive and say, had those numbers not happened, it would’ve been a totally different story of results on the field. I know that.”
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Christian Petersen, Harry How / Getty)
What did you think of this story?
MEH
SOLID
Last edited:
