Away from the glitz and glamour of USC and Alabama, Lane Kiffin settles in at Florida Atlantic
Reporting from Boca Raton, Fla. — Just beyond a chain-link fence, about a football field away from where Lane Kiffin oversees a passing drill, airplanes parade through a turn in preparation for takeoff.
The busy runway at Boca Raton Airport abuts the athletic complex at Florida Atlantic University. Kiffin landed here as head coach after three highly successful but occasionally turbulent seasons as Nick Saban’s offensive coordinator at Alabama.
Planes come, planes go. The buzz and occasional roar provide a unique soundtrack.
“We use it for crowd noise,” Kiffin says after a practice last week.
A few days later, Kiffin and his team will make a loud statement, amassing 804 yards in a 69-31 rout of North Texas. The Owls’ third win in a row improved their record to 4-3 overall and 3-0 in Conference USA.
It also put Kiffin back in the national college football conversation, a spot he occupied regularly at Alabama and before that as a USC assistant under Pete Carroll and as head coach at Tennessee and USC.
Much has changed since Kiffin, 42, was hired as Carroll’s successor at USC in 2010, just before the NCAA handed down sanctions that ranked among the most severe in college athletics history.
Despite the loss of 30 scholarships and a two-year bowl ban, Kiffin went 28-15 in three-plus seasons with the Trojans before former athletic director Pat Haden fired him at a private terminal adjacent to Los Angeles International Airport after a loss at Arizona State. Kiffin subsequently joined Saban’s staff and helped the Crimson Tide win a national title and twice reach the championship game of the College Football Playoff.
Kiffin did not coach in the championship game last January. Hired by Florida Atlantic in the weeks leading up to the semifinal against Washington, he was in the process of hiring staff and recruiting. After the Crimson Tide defeated Washington, Saban suddenly replaced him with former USC coach Steve Sarkisian, who has been an analyst on the staff.
Clemson defeated Alabama for the title.
Now Kiffin is in South Florida, at a school outside the Power 5 working to show once again that he is more than one of the sport’s elite play-callers.
Some of the changes are stark.
Palace-like athletic buildings and weight rooms such as USC’s McKay Center or Alabama’s facility are memories. There are no Heisman or national championship trophies in the lobby of the modest Tom Oxley Center.
Just as it did at USC, Kiffin’s second-story office overlooks the practice fields, though his palatial McKay Center suite dwarfed his current digs. The turf, with palm trees swaying beyond the end zones, is maintained but nothing like the manicured lawns at USC and Alabama.
Much, however, is the same: At practice, Kiffin still wears a white visor, white long sleeved T-shirt and athletic shorts. He still stands, arms crossed intently and rarely smiling, while overseeing drills.
Kiffin is paid a base salary of $950,000. His staff includes younger brother Chris as defensive coordinator. Their father Monte, who also coached at USC, is a staff analyst.
“I was used to Lane,” Monte says. “Now I’ve got two. I’ve got my hands full.”
Kiffin came to Florida Atlantic after surveying the coaching landscape.
He interviewed at Houston. Purdue also was looking for a coach. And Ed Orgeron was in the hunt for an offensive coordinator at Louisiana State.
But Kiffin, who first became a head coach at 31 when he was hired by the Oakland Raiders, saw opportunity at Florida Atlantic, which won only nine games in the previous three seasons and had not finished above .500 since 2008.
“When you’re younger, you’re thinking about, ‘OK, how fast can I move? How big is the place? How much money are you going to make?’ ” Kiffin says. “Well, if you’ve already been at those kinds of places, if you’ve been fortunate to make a lot of money, maybe you start to think a little bit different.”
Kiffin was drawn to the Boca Raton lifestyle — he has a boat and two jet skis at his waterfront home — as well as a fertile Florida recruiting ground and the university’s commitment to invest in the program. Kiffin’s assistant-coach salary pool is the largest in the conference. In January, the school broke ground on a new football facility.
Kiffin knows this is a proving ground.
“If I lose here,” he says, “I’m not getting another head coaching job. Because the story line will be, ‘Oh, he’s a great offensive coordinator, he can coach quarterbacks, score a lot of points, a lot of yards, break a lot of records but can’t get over the hump as a head coach.’
“So it was imperative to find a place that those things were in place to be able to improve the program.”
Chris Kiffin, who worked as a USC administrative assistant in 2010 and came to Florida Atlantic after five seasons as Mississippi’s defensive line coach, says his brother has changed since the last time they worked together.
“It’s a different ballgame when you step off the bus and there’s three sets of parents there cheering you on at an away game, as opposed to thousands of fans shaking the bus when you get off,” Chris says. “But I do see just a calm about him, a happiness that maybe you haven’t seen before in the highly stressful environments.
“He’s happy and we’re all happy, and we’re enjoying it. And you can’t say enough about the kids we coach.”
His players knew of Kiffin’s accomplishments and his reputation. They were eager to play for a coach who tutored national award winners and won at the highest level.
“He’s a really big name in the sport,” junior quarterback Jason Driskell said, noting Kiffin’s focus on offense. “Obviously, playing quarterback, that’s exciting for me.”
Said junior linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair: “I wasn’t going to judge anybody, just like I wouldn’t want to be judged.”
Kiffin’s Alabama tenure did not end as planned. Watching last season’s championship game defeat was difficult. But he values his time under Saban.
“There’s not a day that there’s something that happens where I don’t think, ‘OK, what would coach Saban do here?’ ” he says.
Kiffin, however, is not averse to poking fun at his former boss. He did it during his stint at Tennessee and again this season when he trolled Saban’s comments about positive headlines being “rat poison” for Crimson Tide players.
Kiffin says he doesn’t worry about saying what’s expected from a head coach.
“You start to realize winning defines whether you keep your job,” he says. “Why am I not just being myself? … I just came to the conclusion, ‘Look, if you say something funny and people are going to get offended by that, life’s too short to worry about what everybody writes.’ ”
Kiffin still keeps reminders of USC close by. A book of photographs, with a cover shot of the Trojans in their Coliseum locker room, is displayed in his office. He group texts with Trojans coaches — “It’s almost the exact same staff,” he says — and remains in contact with former players such as Matt Leinart.
“You root for them because you know players, but the coaches especially,” he says.
Kiffin, who went through a divorce last year, returned to Southern California a few weeks ago to visit his children during a bye week for the Owls.
“It’s very surreal when you land there,” he says. “It’s like you land and you go through the airport, it’s like, ‘Was I really the head coach here?’
“Obviously, you’ve got all these good and bad memories, but sometimes it’s, ‘Wow, did that really happen?’ ”
Despite the way his USC tenure ended, Kiffin has remained in contact with Haden.
“I really respected him, I really enjoyed him as a boss,” Kiffin says. “That was every day but one — and one day I really disliked him.”
He pauses and grins, mischievously.
“Maybe a few days after that too,” he adds. “But I eventually got over it.”
Kiffin, however, is not looking back.
His team ranks 17th nationally in offense — Alabama is 12th, USC 31st — and in contention for its first bowl appearance in nine years.
As an office interview comes to an end, a reporter points out a book behind Kiffin’s desk.
Joel Osteen’s “Fresh Start: The New You Begins Today” stands unopened.
“My mom sent me that,” Kiffin says, chuckling. “I haven’t got to that one yet.”
He probably won’t anytime soon.
Kiffin is too busy authoring the next chapter of his career.
In his own inimitable style.
Follow Gary Klein on Twitter @latimesklein
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