Once upon a time, a very angry coach named Nick Saban hired a very ambitious offensive coordinator named Lane Kiffin in Alabama.
At first, the two seemed like an odd couple, a marriage of convenience at best. Saban was a legend who struggled to embrace the explosive passive offenses that were taking over college football. Kiffin was a gifted offensive mind whose career had bottomed out after his firing from USC. The pair won a national championship together in the 2015 season while insisting their relationship was fine.
A new book indicates that was not right. Not that we needed a warning.
In an excerpt from the upcoming book “The Price: What it takes to win in the era of college football chaos” shared with AL.comAuthors Armen Keteyian and John Talty offer a behind-the-scenes account of Alabama’s coaching staff during the Saban-Kiffin era as part of a chapter on their mutual super-agent, Jimmy Sexton.
Sexton reportedly pushed Saban to give Kiffin a chance after the USC fiasco, something the Alabama coach apparently came to regret.
From AL.com:
One such moment came when Kiffin called Sexton to warn him that an angry Saban was about to call him. Why? The offensive coordinator told the head coach he “didn’t know what he was talking about” in a meeting.
As expected, Saban’s less-than-cheerful call came within minutes.
“That son of a b***h,” Saban told his agent, according to the book. “I’m going to fire you, Jimmy, for talking me into hiring that narcissistic idiot.”
None of this is too surprising to anyone even remotely familiar with the two coaches’ personalities. Their (mostly one-sided) animosity It was quite public at timesand they haven’t exactly tried to calm the speculation since they split.
Saban is famous for his strictness and Kiffin for his trolling, so it wasn’t hard to see where things could go wrong:
The book cites a conversation Saban had with another former assistant about Kiffin being the only assistant who consistently questioned Saban and “refused to accommodate Saban’s preferred approach.”
“I’ve never had a coach I couldn’t control,” a disgusted Saban told his assistant.
Saban and Kiffin worked together for three seasons. Or rather, three seasons minus one game, as Saban fired Kiffin before the 2017 College Football Playoff championship game. Kiffin had accepted the head coaching job at Florida Atlantic and Saban decided he preferred Steve Sarkisian to run the offense instead of an outgoing coach.
Alabama lost that game, and you can bet Kiffin thought about it.
Saban abruptly retired in January, while Kiffin continues to coach in the SEC with Ole Miss. Saban has since joined the media as a member of ESPN’s “College GameDay” team, and we can only hope that the show ends up covering the Rebels this season.
