Lane Kiffin was always a popular former coordinator at Alabama among fans, and there was a vocal section of the base who hoped that Kiffin would one day be Nick Saban's successor in Tuscaloosa.
But anyone familiar with his off-the-field antics and bridge-burning during his time at the Capstone told you when Saban retired that Kiffin was never a realistic option to take over. As badly as Kiffin wanted it, he had done too much damage during his time with the Crimson Tide.
The on-field success couldn't overshadow it. And it was immense. Alabama won three consecutive SEC Championships with Kiffin as the OC from 2014-16. They won the national title in 2015 and came within seconds of winning a second straight in 2016.
A lot of fans forget how the Kiffin era ended at Alabama. It ended with Saban firing him the week of the National Championship Game against Clemson because Kiffin's focus was more on the head coaching job at Florida Atlantic than finishing the job with the Crimson Tide.
If that wasn't well enough, the "Joey Freshwater" persona was well-documented in town. Locals have told all sorts of tales of his bar-crawling. But for the first time, Kiffin's exploits have made it to print. John Talty wrote a book called "Lane Being Lane" that is soon to be released. An excerpt of that book was released on Wednesday via Vanity Fair. That excerpt is all about his time working for Saban, and it includes some legitimate bombshells.
Lane Kiffin burned a lot of bridges during his time as Alabama's offensive coordinator
Kiffin's exploits at one of Tuscaloosa's top bars, Innisfree, are discussed at length in that excerpt from Talty's book. It includes a quote from a former analyst who says Saban told him to "keep him away from the sorority girls."
Kiffin rubbed some prominent people the wrong way during his stint at Alabama. As Talty notes in the book:
"Multiple Alabama sources insisted that Kiffin’s behavior during his time in Tuscaloosa precluded him from ever succeeding Nick Saban and becoming the Crimson Tide’s head coach. He had upset too many important people."
Kiffin had a lot of public support among the Tide's fanbase when Saban announced his retirement in January of 2024. But it was just never going to happen. Kiffin has proven himself as a really good head coach, his rehab stint with Saban in Tuscaloosa paying off in the long run. And while he's certainly matured some since leaving Alabama, the trail of chaos he left in his wake was still too fresh.
But that's just Kiffin. Even after rehabilitating his image as the head coach at Ole Miss, all the goodwill he gained from that stint was flushed away by the way he exited Oxford, right before the Rebels' first College Football Playoff appearance, to take the LSU gig.
Since being LSU's head coach, the petulant side of Kiffin has come back in full force before he's even coached a game. Perhaps it's a sign that he never changed. He just learned to be quieter while he was at Ole Miss. Maybe he got a new - and better - publicist.
But Lane will always be Lane.
Perhaps he ends up leading LSU to great success. Maybe he would have done the same thing at Alabama if he had been hired instead of Kalen DeBoer. But at the end of the day, he's never too far away from the next catastrophe.
The next one is coming right around the corner. And when it comes, Alabama fans will be happy that he's in Baton Rouge rather than Tuscaloosa.
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