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Lane Kiffin spent three seasons working for Nick Saban at Alabama following his dismissal at USC. In a recent retrospective from ESPN’s Chris Low and Harry Lyles Jr., Kiffin said he received his fair share of “ass-chewings” from Saban during that time.
The biggest came in 2016. During fall camp, Kiffin described a good-on-good drill between his offense and Saban’s defense in which he called reverses, a double pass, and put several touchdowns on the board. Afterward, Saban told Kiffin he was just trying to win the drill and not trying to help the defense.
When Kiffin responded, “Isn’t that the point in good-on-good situations on offense, to see if you can move the ball?” Saban was said to be furious.
The following practice, Kiffin said he ran out the most vanilla offense he could think of. He recalled Saban once again being upset in the staff meeting afterward and asking for an explanation.
“‘I’m just running what I thought you would want me to run against the defense,'” Kiffin recalled saying. “Again, it was just me being smart-ass me.”
At that point, Kiffin said Saban cleared the room to speak to him privately.
From ESPN:
“I have to sit there, and he is screaming at me, standing over me screaming as I’m sitting in my chair. I thought he was going to fight me physically,” said Kiffin, who can laugh about it now. “So, yes, I got a lot of ass-chewings, but that’s the biggest one and one that no one saw. But I deserved it.”
Saban, however, had one last salvo, which Kiffin and the offensive coaches from that staff still find hilarious. Saban compared Kiffin to a children’s book character, P.J. Funnybunny, a spoiled bunny who went around creating havoc.
“He screamed at me that I was the bunny,” Kiffin said, “and we were like, ‘What the hell is that? There’s no way Coach has read a little kid’s bedtime story like that!'”
Kiffin’s time in Tuscaloosa was certainly turbulent, but it was also plenty successful. He was a Broyles Award finalist in 2014 and he was part of the staff in 2015 that won a national championship.
Since leaving Saban’s staff, Kiffin has engineered four double-digit-win seasons in seven years as a head coach both at Florida Atlantic and Ole Miss. The Rebels just went 11-2 in 2023 and look poised for an even brighter 2024 campaign.
No doubt Saban’s influence will remain even still now that he’s retired.
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Derek Peterson does a bit of everything, not unlike Taysom Hill. He has covered Oklahoma, Nebraska, the Pac-12, and now delivers CFB-wide content.
