Nick Saban coached the Dolphins from 2005 through 2006. Lane Kiffin coached the Raiders from 2007 until early in the 2008 season. In 2014, Saban hired Kiffin.
And it ended roughly as well for Kiffin in Tuscaloosa as it ended for him in Oakland.
Vanity Fair has published an excerpt of John Talty’s new book about Kiffin — Lane Being Lane: The Story of Lane Kiffin, College Football’s Agent of Chaos — and it is, above all else, an entertaining reflection on Lane’s time with the ultimate my-way-or-the-highway head coach.
Kiffin, per the book, had a habit of on-campus carousing: “‘You’ve got to keep Lane away from the girls that are in college,’ Saban said, according to one former coach. ‘Just keep him away from the sorority girls. Make sure they’ve graduated college or are working a job.’”
Kiffin reportedly had an alias that he used when chasing co-eds. It was, per the book, “Joey Freshwater.”
While the off-field escapades didn’t enhance their relationship, Saban decided to move on from Kiffin after watching the film of Alabama’s 24-7 win over Washington, which earned a berth in the 2016 national championship.
“As Saban spent hours rewatching the game film, what he saw disturbed him,” Talty writes. “Kiffin had called plays the team hadn’t practiced. It wasn’t the first time he had done that — it was almost like a party trick for Kiffin to draw something up during a game — but the savant playmaker was off his game.”
Kiffin had taken the head-coaching job at Florida Atlantic, but he was staying at Alabama through the postseason. Saban decided to pull the plug on that approach, referring to Kiffin with a colorful and profane three-syllable term. From the book: “‘How do we score twenty-four points against Washington when they suck?’ Saban told a confidant. ‘He’s obviously thinking about FAU and he’s not thinking about us.’”
As Kiffin thinks about his new job at LSU, where Saban coached before heading to the NFL, Talty’s book looks to contain plenty of nuggets that could become fodder for a variety of probing questions for Kiffin — questions that could elicit some memorable answers.
As a time when Lane Kiffin is ready to pounce on as many former NFL players as he can, a former USC colleague of Kiffin’s has a far different viewpoint.
“The fact that somebody out there is going to take a player off of an NFL roster and tell somebody who’s been doing it for nine months to go kick rocks, that doesn’t sit well with me,” Texas coach Steve Sarkisian said Monday, via David Eckert of 247sports.com. “I think that’s wrong. That, morally, is wrong.”
It’s hardly uncommon, especially in the NFL. On Monday, players who spent the entire offseason, training camp, and preseason in the building will lose their brand-new roster spots to newcomers claimed on waivers or signed as free agents.
The dynamic has become relevant in college football, for this year only, because of the NCAA’s new five-year rule. The NCAA didn’t realize, or didn’t care, that the change would unlock an effort by players who had only four years at the college level to get another season.
All due respect to Sarkisian, but football coaches will say whatever it takes to justify whatever they want. Sarkisian, like Oregon’s Dan Lanning, doesn’t want any of the available former NFL players. that makes it easier for them to get on a soapbox when it comes to embracing players who were released by their NFL teams.
Two distinct schools of thought have emerged regarding the recent manifestation of the chaos in college football. One relies on using the unprecedented ability of former NFL players to return to college for another season as fuel to turn the Protect College Sports Act into the law of the land. The other arises from a burning desire to win as many football games as possible right now.
It has created a scenario in which conferences like the SEC, the Big Ten, and most recently the Big 12 have adopted performative rules aimed at building political momentum for antitrust exemption and schools like LSU have jumped on the opportunity to enhance the roster with the addition of players who had been under contract with NFL teams.
Not surprisingly, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry is siding with his state’s flagship football program.
“This whole thing is ridiculous. Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” Landry said regarding the SEC’s rule, via John Blau of the Advocate.
“I’ve been saying for a year that college sports need to be fixed,” Landry added. “The NCAA could have done it. Congress could have done it. Neither did. Now the SEC is creating a legal mess over athletes it told were out of eligibility, only to change the rules afterward.”
The legal mess keeps getting messier. The conferences potentially are violating the court order allowing players to get the fifth year that the NCAA has now baked into the rules.
“The SEC accepted the courts’ decisions on Diego Pavia and Trinidad Chambliss,” Landry said. “Why is this different? You can’t tell athletes their college careers are over, watch them move on, change the rules later, and then punish them for not predicting the future.”
Of course, Landry is only taking that position because LSU wants to add these players. If LSU coach Lane Kiffin was content to move forward with the players he has and if, say, Georgia wanted to sign former NFL players who have secured a fifth year through the courts, Landry would be aggressively waving an SEC flag and complaining about Georgia’s effort to violate the spirit of amateur athletics.
Everyone involved in this fiasco is acting in their own interests. And the ultimate prize continues to be creating enough of a mess that Congress will pass the Protect College Sports Act under the guise of injecting normalcy into the process — while also stripping the players of their earning potential and mobility.
You know, the two things that got Kiffin to ditch Ole Miss during the 2025 season and pounce on the chance to work for LSU.
It’s easy to blame the players for the latest slice of college football chaos, arising from the effort by members of the high-school class of 2022 to get a fifth year of eligibility — even after they signed NFL contract. The far more appropriate target seems to be LSU coach Lane Kiffin.
CBS Sports reports that “Kiffin and the Tigers reached out to multiple players on NFL rosters or their representation in an effort to get them to bring a lawsuit against the NCAA and return to school.” CBS Sports also reports that LSU has “had conversations with others who remain in NFL camps ahead of the league’s cut day on Aug. 30.”
It underscores the obsession with acquiring the best collection of players possible. And it puts Kiffin’s justification that “they’re either going to play for you or they’re going to play for someone else” in its proper context.
Based on the CBS Sports report, Kiffin isn’t simply reacting to a development over which he had no control. Instead, he’s hoping to reap the intended benefit of an outcome he helped engineer.
Beyond that, Kiffin and LSU apparently interfered with the contractual relationships between multiple NFL teams and their employees, by offering them alternative football employment while they already had jobs.
Although it’s unlikely that any NFL team would sue LSU and/or Kiffin for tampering with their players, it’s not a stretch to think that, once the seed of making more money at LSU than they’d likely earn on a practice squad was planted, those players attempted to set the stage to be released by their NFL teams.
Regardless of whether anything comes from it, it shows how brazen Kiffin is willing to be to get what he wants. Not that there was any doubt about it; he bailed on Ole Miss during the season to jump to a better deal with another program. It’s no surprise that, now that Kiffin has landed at LSU, he’ll do whatever it takes to have as much success as possible there.
Perhaps so that he can eventually bail on LSU to jump to a better deal elsewhere.
Browns coach Todd Monken has spent much of his career in the college ranks. Things have changed dramatically since then, however.
He currently has a first-year player on the roster who has entered the transfer portal, after winning an injunction this week that has given him another year of college football.
“Man, isn’t this shit crazy?” Monken told reporters after Saturday’s preseason contest against the Bills, a game in which Wright didn’t play. “I don’t even know what to say. As far as I know, he’s had a medical issue that wasn’t allowing him to practice. That’s a medical issue. It has nothing to do with me. He was cleared, so we dressed him just in case we had to have him. . . .
“I don’t know what to say. I wondered why Lane Kiffin reached out to me a week ago, now I know. I didn’t call him back; I guess I should have.”
Kiffin’s LSU is indeed one of the programs that has been trying to set the stage to create room for first-year NFL players who could return to college for another season.
Because even though the system craves a return to something that seems normal, the coaches want to win now. Those who can take advantage of the current chaos can acquire a legitimate edge in the quest to do so.
