Men's Journal

At 35, Lane Kiffin has held three of the most marquee coaching jobs in football, but also courted a career’s worth of controversy. Now in his dream job at USC, he’s already facing his biggest storm ever. Time to put up or shut up.

by Paul Solotaroff

It was D-day-plus-two at the University of Southern California, and the quad was on full lockdown. There were guards posted up at the practice field, chains on the gates of the oval track, and officers patrolling the concrete stands, checking forearms for visitor wristbands. Forty-eight hours after its football program was hit with nuclear sanctions — the deletion of its BCS title in ’04; exclusion from bowl games in 2011 and ’12; and the loss of 30 scholarships over the next three years, a shock-and-awe strike by the NCAA after its probe into the dealings of its former star tailback Reggie Bush — the school was in a frenzy of self-enforcement. Lane Kiffin, its young and supremely confident new coach, had prepped for months to confront bad news, but this was beyond his worst nightmare. As he walked the strip between the athletic building and the field where he was staging a one-day camp for high school football players, he gaped at the white-shirted compliance cops conversing on walkie-talkies. “You kidding me?” he muttered under his breath. “It’s like Shawshank all of a sudden.”

For years Kiffin had been one of the most quotable men in the sport, a barb-tossing, baby-faced starter of feuds with championship coaches and team owners. But since landing at USC — his “dream job,” he calls it — and leaving his last employer, the University of Tennessee, rudely in the lurch last winter, he’d been on his best behavior. He’d said the right things here, stayed off the back pages, and deftly recruited two killer classes of kids while cracking down on a team that cratered last season, losing four times in conference play. But now, after two days of media siege — sound trucks crowding the palm-lined square and news crews camped on the steps of Heritage Hall, the steel-and-stucco eyesore of postwar construction that houses the football office — Kiffin was quietly boiling. He hadn’t seen his kids for four days, he had missed his five-year-old daughter’s dance recital, and his eyes were red from lack of sleep, the weight of the week landing hard. “This was payback for SC winning so much. The penalty doesn’t begin to fit the crime.”

Well, maybe. But Bush, the 2005 Heisman Trophy winner (the school is giving back the tainted award), did drive to games in a car so pimped it made the cover of Dub magazine, and his family was quartered in a San Diego manse that beggared some of his coaches’ homes. All told, almost $300,000 in cash and favors were allegedly laid out by two men hoping to represent Bush when he turned pro in ’06. Surely, someone should have noticed that the superstar was being paid like one in college, but none of then-coach Pete Carroll’s staffers, of whom Kiffin was one, claim to have seen a thing.

“These agents had nothing to do with our program or with Reggie coming here — he was already here. In the past, schools got crushed for paying kids to enroll. We didn’t do that, and don’t have to.”

He cited SMU and Alabama as past offenders rightly punished for that crime, then fumed about the ban’s collateral damage. “The players here now, they’ll barely feel it — they’ll play one game less a
year and move on. It’s my staff that’ll take the hit in three years, when we’re down 30 guys and playing freshmen. That’s what burns me — those men and their families. How are they to blame for what happened?”

However earnest Kiffin sounds, loyalty has never been his strong suit. In Oakland, where, at 31, he was the youngest head coach in NFL history, he offended Al Davis within hours of being hired (he referred to him as Al, which no one does; Davis, duly piqued, called him Lance), twitted his defensive coordinator as a stooge of the owner, and insulted his players as fat and lazy to reporters eager to publish his taunts. At Tennessee, where he brought a monster staff in to revive an exhausted program, he mocked Florida coach Urban Meyer, a two-time champion, as a recruiting cheat, provoked Alabama’s Nick Saban with a stream of jibes, and incensed his own boosters with a slew of violations that brought NCAA probers to town. Then, after raising a ruckus in both places, he was out the door fast for a better job, leaving behind a rubble of dashed hopes. Loyalty, thy name was not Lane.

“Meanwhile,” he bristled, “other schools are smelling blood, calling my juniors and seniors. They’re calling our recruits now, saying, ‘SC’s done, they’re finished.’ I can’t wait till September is all I’ll say. They’re gonna see a fury coming at ’em.”

—-

For anyone not paying attention the last decade, the profile of the college football coach has changed. Out is the template of the Lead-Bellied Screamer who ruled the locker room by naked fear. Gone but not lamented is the Sansabelt Hustler, whose golf-course charm with big-ticket boosters was matched only by his disregard for rules. And thankfully only a memory is the Grand Old Man, whose cult of personality was premised on games he won a decade ago.

In place of these mastodons is a new kind of leader, the College Coach 2.0. He is typically young, in his mid-to-late 30s, and spent his 20s learning the craft instead of kicking around the NFL. He scans and stores data like a systems geek and gives his brand-name assistants room to work. In tone and style, he’s a technocrat obsessed with development — the relentless pursuit of top young talent to execute his plan. Where Coach 1.0 spent nights in his office working on coverage schemes, Coach 2.0 is up all hours parsing recruiting blogs. The underside of this is a shortfall of sentiment for people and institutions. In his digitized worldview, product is the driver; everything else is a distant second.

His remarks in Oakland and Knoxville notwithstanding, Kiffin places himself with this new breed, a cool-running, corporatized leader. He doesn’t disown what he said in previous places as much as cast it as a business plan discarded. “At Tennessee, I had to go in talking, make a lot of noise to get attention. I didn’t love everything I said down there, but we had to get notice for our football program with only eight weeks to sign a recruiting class. And I’ll tell you what — it worked. We got a top-10 bunch, and every kid in the region knew our names.”

It was a remarkable haul for a school that prospects had shunned as prehistoric, and in the process Kiffin roused half the rabble in Red-State Nation. He snatched key assistants from Alabama and LSU by doubling or tripling their salaries, boasted he’d sing “Rocky Top” when he beat Florida in the Swamp, and uttered a string of schoolboy jokes that made the papers. The fire-starter, though, was the one about Florida’s Meyer, who’d phoned top recruit Nu’Keese Richardson while he was making his official visit to Tennessee. “I love the fact that Urban had to cheat and still didn’t get him,” Kiffin said to big laughs at a booster breakfast. The line enraged Meyer, who didn’t take Kiffin’s call when he phoned to apologize later, and brought instant censure from the Southeast Conference. It did no favors for Richardson, either — 11 months later, he was busted for a bungled stickup outside a quick-mart. Kiffin kicked him off the team, but two months after that, Kiffin himself was gone, flying to USC on a booster’s jet, along with his father, Monte, who’d coached the defense. Having energized VolNation, Kiffin up and broke its heart. The campus nearly burned in the ensuing riot.

But that was then and this was now, as Kiffin, 35, pointed out. “I’ve come to a place where the program speaks, where the power of USC says it all. I’m back where I belong, in the greatest job on Earth, where I can truly and totally be myself. We have the history, the weather, the talent pool, the trophies — there’s no reason to ever go elsewhere.”

He was sitting in his large but featureless office a month before the sanctions came down. Almost a half-year in, there was nothing on the walls to signify he was here: no pictures of his lovely (and patient) wife, Layla, or their three small, photogenic kids; no packets of clips from Scouts Inc. or dog-eared tendency charts. He brooks no mess in abode or appearance and abides none in his players, either. Earlier, I’d watched as he hauled in a kid for ditching a final exam. Dillon Baxter, a five-star freshman tailback who’d enrolled a semester early to play spring football, had skipped the test to be with his ailing grandma, but Kiffin wasn’t hearing excuses. For 20 minutes, he laid into Baxter as a superb but lazy talent, citing from memory each lateness to class and missed tutorial session. “Every dumb thing you do, every poor choice you make, it’s taking money out of your pocket,” Kiffin said. “You got 35 months till the NFL draft. Do I tell those scouts you’re a sound investment or a kid I couldn’t count on to do his work?” Baxter hung his head, vowing to grow up. His father looked on sternly, saying, “Thanks for bringing me in, coach; I needed to know this. I got a rocket in my pocket if he does it again.”

It was a deftly handled dress-down: nuanced but cutting, the tone Kiffin aspires to wield. The words were honed and fussy, as if every last one of them had met with the school’s compliance cops.

Elsewhere I saw ample signs of the sleek machine he was building. It began with a staff that includes his father, Monte, one of the most masterful defensive minds in the game, and Ed Orgeron, the former head man at Ole Miss who’s widely acclaimed as the country’s best recruiter. (He memorably played himself in The Blind Side.) In the war room down the hall, mounted on a whiteboard, were the names and vitals of the top 200 prospects in the nation, most of whom Kiffin’s crew had bombarded with calls and letters since the recruiting cycle had started a month earlier. “On the very first day, April 15, he had us all come in at 3 am and start calling up the East Coast kids, where it was 6 am,” says Chris Kiffin, Lane’s younger brother and a defensive assistant on the staff. “At 4 am, we called the Midwest kids, telling them we loved them and to think SC.” Lastly, at six, they called the West Coast kids, where the school does the bulk of its recruiting. “People ask if I can coach — well, isn’t recruiting coaching?” says Lane, who helped land the top recruiting class three years in a row during his previous run at SC. “You’re a lot smarter coach when you’ve got a bunch of All-Americans playing each other in practice every day.”

No one doubts his eye for talent or his brilliant hand at running an offense. When he took over as coordinator in 2005, the Trojans staged a laser show like nothing before in the annals of college history: almost 50 points a game and 588 yards of total offense. But what people still talk about at USC is Kiffin’s crackpot call in the 2006 Rose Bowl against Texas, going for it and failing, on fourth-and-two with his best player off the field. “Why Reggie Bush watched that play from the sideline is something Lane’ll take to his grave,” says a Trojan insider of the decision that may have cost SC its third straight title. “The biggest moment of his career, and he had a brain fart. That’s why, even here, we say, ‘Can he coach?’ ”

Yes, with Kiffin, it’s always the judgment issue, the maturity to see a plan through to completion and not trip over his cocksureness. That first time I dropped by campus, in May, he was remarkably composed, sticking to script about discipline and focus, his watchwords since coming to L.A. Kiffin and his staff smacked their players in the mouth with a brutal two-week primer in the spring, running them through gassers and suicide drills before they ever let them touch a ball. “It was hell,” says Mitch Mustaine, the senior QB who will back up Matt Barkley this year. “Worst I’ve been through on a football field, but then he built us all back together.”

Kiffin imposed a fierce conduct code off the field, as well. Anyone late to class would be woken before dawn to do bear crawls on the dew at the practice field. Anyone sitting anywhere but the first two rows of class would be marked down as absent and made to run. “Not that we were lazy, but coach tightened things up, made us all work a lot smarter,” says Barkley, who played superbly last year as a freshman starter. “Being one of the guys who had to run at 5 am, I can tell you that it did the trick.” When their grades were tallied at the end of term, the players posted their best aggregate marks since early in Carroll’s reign.

But for all the effort to reboot himself as the soul of the new machine, bits of the old brazen Kiffin poked through. Working out one morning in the varsity gym, he griped about the hip-hop over the PA system.

“Can’t listen to that crap, though my players like it and I let ’em think that I do too,” he said, smirking.

“Someone spread the rumor that I’m friends with Lil Wayne ’cause he talked about me in one of his songs. Fine, whatever, if it helps with recruiting. Maybe I’ll bring him in when he’s out of jail.” The next day, basking in the heady news that his staff had won commitments from three prospects and in surviving what he feared would be a public beheading (it wasn’t) on HBO’s Real Sports, he called Orgeron, who was scouting the Valley, to crow. “Hey, did you hear HBO gave me a raise, said I’m getting $20 million from USC? That’ll really make ’em hate me in Tennessee!”

—-

At an age when most men are still waiting for their first big break, Kiffin has already had a career’s worth of jobs. Counting back to his first assistant gig at USC, he has earned four promotions and three plum head coaching jobs. Some of that is smarts and some of it luck; being the son of a coach as widely admired as Monte, who spent 25 years in the NFL, certainly opened doors. But don’t discount the part that tenacity played. At Fresno State, where he was a third-string passer in the mid-’90s, Kiffin gave up his last year of eligibility to be an unpaid assistant; come spring break, when his friends were pounding shooters in Cabo, he was in Tampa, where his dad was the Bucs defensive coordinator, sitting in on game-plan meetings. Even now, when he submits to a brief vacation, he sneaks off to call his campus spies about which players are working out. He has no hobbies like golf or tennis and doesn’t read books or watch TV. That is how Kiffin himself was raised, idolizing a dad who worked so much that the Tampa Bay address on his driver’s license was One Buc Place — i.e., the team headquarters.

Perhaps the best person to talk to about Kiffin’s relentlessness is his wife, Layla. One night I met the two of them for dinner in Santa Monica. She showed up before him, a tall blonde so pneumatically toned that a fan in Tennessee started a Facebook page called “Our Coach’s Wife Is Hotter Than Your Coach’s Wife.” She described how Kiffin “scouted” her after they were introduced by Monte. “I was working for the Bucs doing special events when Lane came down to Tampa to visit his dad,” said Layla, herself the child of football royalty. (Her father, John Reaves, was an All-American at Florida.) “He stopped by my desk and pretty much never left.”

Kiffin arrived in a camp shirt and flip-flops, ignoring the stares of other diners. He ordered a beer — “I couldn’t do that in Knoxville; someone’d post a shot of it on their blog” — then told his version of the courtship. “I lied to her, said I had friends coming to town and didn’t know where to take them, could she show us? And she was like, ‘I guess so — gotta keep Monte happy,’ and I kept on running that play call till she stopped it. Five dates later, we were engaged.”

Layla begged to differ — “it was way more than five” — but quickly ceded the point. After 11 years of marriage, she’s learned to pick her battles, having made five homes for him in the past 10 years, parented their children nearly single-handedly, and delivered the youngest one, a boy named Monte (his middle name is Knox, as in Knoxville), while Kiffin called recruits from the operating room. The one thing she asked him for, he’s largely honored: He sleeps in his office only once or twice a month. “I was so afraid of him becoming his dad, never coming home and seeing his kids,” she said. “Monte always had a beautiful house but stayed at work to save the 10-minute drive.” Kiffin gave a shrug, saying: “It’s the first thing Dad taught me: Never leave the office before your bosses.”

For a boy who grew up revering his father, Kiffin saw little of him at home. But even at his old man’s NFL training camps, where he was a sideline fixture as a ball boy and errand runner, Kiffin was too busy cribbing notes to ask Dad to play catch. “To me, the biggest fun was sneaking into meetings and seeing how they game-planned opponents,” he says. He also made a string of connections that would serve him later on, none bigger than Pete Carroll, then a defensive backs coach who worked with Monte on five teams. “Lane was a natural — had the appetite for work and a sharp, cunning mind,” says Carroll, who spent nine momentous seasons at USC before bolting for the NFL’s Seahawks this year. “He’d hang out after practice, ask me to throw him balls and teach him how to run routes.”

It was Carroll who gave Kiffin his first big job in 2001, after Carroll came on as USC’s coach. It’s most unusual for a kid in his 20s to be named receivers coach at such a big-time program, but by then, Kiffin had already logged three years as a graduate assistant and NFL staffer. “When he started with us, he had an abrasive style and was trying to be a tough guy,” says Carroll. “I pulled him aside and told him to coach with his brains, not by yelling at guys. To his credit, he turned it around quick.” That was back when USC was Norma Desmond at 60, a star long removed from former glory and struggling to play .500. Kiffin hit the road and pulled top recruits out of Michigan, Florida, and New Jersey. Soon, SC ran its track-meet offense through wideouts that Kiffin had brought in. But even as he climbed the ranks at SC, Kiffin looked down the road to a major head coaching slot. “Lane’s an A-to-C guy, not A to B. He didn’t want to take a small program,” says his father.

Enter the Raiders, football’s compost heap, with an owner long past his sell date. When Al Davis fired Art Shell in 2007 and sought to hire his fifth coach in seven years, Kiffin wasn’t at the top of his list — even among SC coaches. Ahead of him was Steve Sarkisian, with whom he ran the Trojan offense. But Sarkisian wisely declined the job, and Davis went with Kiffin, then 31. “It was wacko even by Raiders standards,” says Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle. “Lane wasn’t on the radar, wasn’t ready to make the jump, and his résumé proved he wasn’t ready. But as long as the USC media guide was open, Al figured, ‘What’s the harm?’ ”

What followed was 20 months of burlesque horror, The Longest Yard meets The Last House on the Left. Davis, then 78 and so enfeebled that he ruled the roost by golf cart, served as GM and scouting chief, drafting raw talent off of obsolete metrics and paying a stiff markup for fading stars. Kiffin battled him over roster decisions (he strongly opposed taking pre-Subway-Jared-size QB JaMarcus Russell, the biggest bust in NFL history, with the first pick in the ’07 draft) and groused to the media about his lack of input and the ineptitude of his players, which cost him loyalty from his squad. Worse, after promising Raiders fans an “explosive, powerful offense,” Kiffin called run after run to keep games close and the ball out of Russell’s hands. This enraged Davis, who’d hired Kiffin off his air-war credentials at SC.

“I did make mistakes,” Kiffin concedes. “I said things to the media about players’ weight and performance and not always giving 100 percent.” Pressed for other examples, he changes the subject, citing the advice of counsel. (He filed a claim against Davis for $400,000 in unpaid wages after he was fired in ’08. A decision from an arbitrator is pending.) “But it was, and I never use this word, impossible there. There was constant craziness, a divided staff, and an owner who came to work at 3 pm. He’d constantly give me the speech about him being in football longer than I had been alive, and whenever I came up with a bright idea, he’d say, ‘How many Hall-of-Famers have you coached?’ ”

Kiffin’s stint in Oakland ended with a stroke of inspired insult shtick: an attempted field goal from 76 yards just before the half against San Diego. “When he lined up Janikowski from his own 24, everyone in the press box went, ‘Holy shit! He’s telling Al to go fuck himself on TV!’ ” says Steve Corkran of the Contra Costa Times, who broke the story of Kiffin’s firing three days later. Over dessert in Santa Monica, Kiffin mounted a straight face while denying any hostile intent. “I thought he could make it; I honestly did. He’d done it in practice from there.”

Really? From the infield dirt?

“Yeah,” he says, “but he has a big leg, and the wind was blowing out that way.”

—-

Back in the spring, Kiffin’s mood was bright, reflecting the confidence of a man with four aces. In less than five months, he’d put his brand on the team and was laying the ground for an epic run like the one he’d helped lead the prior decade. He had a brilliant bunch of playmakers coming this fall: Robert Woods and Kyle Prater, both speed-to-burn wideouts, and a future Heisman contender in tailback Baxter. Just as hopeful was the 2011 class, the most notable talent being De’Anthony Thompson, a scatback runner from Crenshaw High. Thompson, in turn, was lobbying his lineman, a kid they all called Big Juicy, to join him. Just a month into recruiting, Kiffin was well along to a second straight haul considered the best in the country. “It takes three strong classes to build a stable winner,” he said. “Coaching’s all about talent at this level.”

When I returned a month later, I expected to find him staggered by the punch of NCAA sanctions. But his tone was resolutely cool. “It’s been three days of hell, but our will is strong; we’ll use this for inspiration. As I told my players, we can complain and point fingers or bank our anger for game time.”

And his own reaction to this latest controversy he’s found himself entangled in? “I could sit here and say, ‘Why did Oakland happen? Why did leaving Tennessee cause the trouble it did?’ Those things happened to prep me for this, to be a stable manager in a crisis. My model was Obama and his coolness under fire, the confidence he projects during disaster.”

Rare is the football coach who name-checks Obama when the chips are down, but his answer ducked the issue of accountability. Kiffin claims he didn’t know what was happening with Reggie Bush, consumed as he was by the hours and workload of being the offensive coordinator. But what, short of driving a Brink’s truck to games, did Bush have to do to get his attention? If two street agents could brazenly buy his best player, was it really in Kiffin’s interest to plead ignorance?

Kiffin had no use for such questions; he was too busy holding his team together. On the morning of June 10, an hour before the news broke, he called his staff in and handed them the script they would tell their star
recruits on the phone: “We’re still USC, still the team that others fear, and still the school that trains you for the NFL. We’re King Kong to deal with when we aren’t pissed off, and now we’ve got a chip on our shoulder.” Then he met his players and recited the pitch, urging them to fight for each other. “We were pretty jacked,” says Barkley. “We’re thinking, ‘Thirteen-game season, 13 burials.’ ”

Downstairs, meanwhile, it was bedlam on the plaza. A dozen trucks with satellite dishes were clustered by the gate, and 60 reporters mobbed Heritage Hall for an on-camera response from a school leader. It came from neither the longtime president Steve Sample nor Mike Garrett, the since-ousted athletic director.

Instead, it was Kiffin facing the hordes, and in his remarks he used the word powerful three times in the first 30 seconds of his seven-minute press conference. The thinly veiled subtext of his apologia: You tried — and failed — to break us. Now taste our wrath. It was a winning show of poise under duress and hit home with his intended audience: the oversize kids in the room upstairs. Bombarded with phone calls from rival coaches trying to lure them to other schools, the upperclassmen decided, to a man, to stay at SC, bowl game or no. (Kiffin did lose one of his prize freshmen, though, offensive lineman Seantrel Henderson.) “I’ll use that extra week to train for the Combine,” said Ronald Johnson, the senior wideout and sure first-rounder in next year’s draft. “This is USC: We finish what we start here. We’ll play like we got 13 bowl games coming.”

That Sunday afternoon, when his football camp ended, Kiffin trudged upstairs to meet his staffers. All were exhausted, even Orgeron, who keeps his office fridge stocked to the gills with drum-size cans of Red Bull. He was talking blearily about a 10th-grade tackle when someone knocked on the door. In walked the cream of the 2011 class: Max Wittek, a 6-foot-3, cannon-armed passer who’ll be a senior at QB factory Mater Dei in Santa Ana, California, and Thompson, the tailback from Crenshaw. They’d come to renew their vows to USC and had brought Kiffin something to lift his spirits. Behind them through the door strode Marcus Martin, the Earth-moving tackle known as Big Juicy and the most hotly recruited lineman on the coast. Dressed head to toe in SC colors, he said, “I’m here to say I’m comin’. I heard you need me?”

The staff erupted in profane joy, dog-piling Martin near the whiteboard. Kiffin bit his lip, squelching a smile, a tear, or both, then quietly left the room and closed the door. It may or may not have been a rules violation for a head coach to hug a high school junior, but Kiffin wasn’t taking any chances.