BOCA RATON, Fla. — Lane Kiffin can finally go grocery shopping again.
After a decade in the spotlight at places like Alabama, USC, Tennessee and the Oakland Raiders, Kiffin has found himself some anonymity here as the first-year head coach at Florida Atlantic. He likes it that way. Flying back to California to see his kids is a lot easier now, too, going direct from Fort Lauderdale instead of drives and layovers from Tuscaloosa.
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He’s winning, too. After an 0-2 start against Navy and Wisconsin by a combined 73-33 score, the Owls have won five of their last six games, and they’re putting up a lot of points. They had 804 yards in a 69-31 win at North Texas two weeks ago and outscored two-time defending Conference USA champ Western Kentucky 22-0 in the fourth quarter of a 42-28 win last week.
The only team undefeated in CUSA play, the Owls host Marshall on Friday in a huge division game, and a conference title is suddenly in their sights. Kiffin is known for his quarterback work, but this is a run-heavy attack with offensive coordinator Kendal Briles. Sophomore running back Devin Singletary is one of the best in the country, rushing for 1,053 yards and 18 touchdowns, including six consecutive 100-yard games. He enters the Marshall game as the fifth-most efficient running back in the FBS.
Kiffin is doing some things differently in his fourth head coaching role, but don’t go thinking he’s a changed person trying to prove you wrong. He’s not apologizing.
Kiffin sat down with The All-American in his office this week and talked football, winning, his Twitter personality and life in Boca. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The All-American: Offensively, what changed after those first two games? It’s really been clicking since then.
Lane Kiffin: “A couple things. You really don’t know personnel until you play, in college. There’s no preseason games. … We started to combine two things. We have this super-fast Briles system. The No. 1 thing in that is pace of play. When you study it, it’s not necessarily the plays, it’s how fast they’re run and the defense doesn’t line up. At Alabama the last three years, we went fast, but we didn’t go super-fast like these guys. But we created a lot of problems with exotic formations, motions. I said, what if we combine the two?
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“Kendal calls the plays and does everything, but let’s start implementing a few problem plays and formations and motions. It’s hard to defend us, because we may snap the ball faster than you line up, and now here comes this other stuff. Maybe that extra time at Wisconsin (during Hurricane Irma) was a blessing for our players to come together and as a staff. We’re together all day long in a hotel. We sat down and started adding problem plays to it. Since then, I think we’ve had the most yards in the country.”
(Steve Roberts / USA TODAY Sports)You’ve always put the ball in your best playmakers’ hands. Devin split carries last year, and he’s taken off this year. What did you see from him?
LK: “He had a great freshman year, 1,000 yards, works hard. It wasn’t a bye week, but it felt like it, because we were in Wisconsin so long. You’re just in the hotel. It made me evaluate us like in a bye. I just thought, this guy’s not touching the ball enough. This guy is really special. …
“My job as head coach is to play the best players for the team to win. That’s what I’m hired to do. It’s not to play seniors. It’s not to play a guy because I recruited him from somewhere. We don’t do any of that. We’ve always told recruits that, and they know that.”
“My job as head coach is to play the best players for the team to win. That’s what I’m hired to do. It’s not to play seniors. It’s not to play a guy because I recruited him from somewhere. We don’t do any of that. We’ve always told recruits that, and they know that.”
Besides not calling plays, are there things you’re doing in this head coaching job differently than the previous jobs?
LK: “Oh yeah. The calling plays is a decision. It had nothing to do with going to Alabama. One time I said Alabama was like dog years. That got played really poorly. That was not the context I was saying it. I don’t think Coach Saban liked it very much, because I was still there when I said it. What I meant was you’re learning there. He teaches the coaches every day. A lot of coaches sit in the office, do their stuff. He does everything. So you learn so much, because you’re in a staff meeting every day, and multiple times a day during the season.
“Not a lot of people do that. He’s always talking through his decision-making, so you’re really learning. Assistant coaches, until you become a head coach, you have no idea how to be a head coach. You can’t read a book. A lot of head coaches do stuff and you don’t know why they’re making decisions. He really coaches his coaches. When I said ‘dog years,’ it wasn’t like I felt I was there 21 years. You learn so much in one year.”
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So do you hold more staff meetings now? Are there things you’ve brought from him?
LK: “I do more, but that’s also because of not calling plays. I don’t have to watch as much offensive film. I don’t have to do the scripts, so I have more time. Before, I used to be the offensive coordinator that was the head coach. Now I’m the head coach that knows what we do on defense.”
How important is Twitter to you?
LK: “It’s really not that important. I didn’t sit down with some plan two years ago and say, ‘Here’s the plan. This is why.’ I really just fell into it. It started when they made an account so we could use it in recruiting because kids post stuff on there and it’s a way to communicate. You used to not be able to text recruits, but you could do that. That’s how I started learning it. Then it was, OK, these kids use it and see things.
“Anything with me, usually when I do something, it’s going to be assumed negative immediately, just like the dog years. I may post a Tennessee license plate, because I was there recruiting and the kids take it as, ‘Coach is coming to see me today’ and show their friends. That’s how it started. Now, I just think it’s funny to see people’s reactions. It just blows me away in this world what people get upset about. I know people say life’s too short, but I like to see some of the reactions of people, because it’s funny that people are that consumed by what you retweet or make a joke. It creates so much conversation about, ‘It he good, is he bad, what does it mean?’
“It is not something where, at 8 o’clock every day, I’m going to have a meeting with our SID or someone and think about what we can do today. It’s really not that. It’s literally, I’ve got a five-minute break, I’m looking at text messages, I scroll through and see something and it’d be funny to see that person come to The FAU. That’s all it is. There’s not some huge plan.
“The only plan is, you have to have specific plans for which job you’re at. You don’t have the same plan at FAU that you do at USC. There’s just different things. Do I take more interviews here even though I really want to go watch this practice film? And it holds up staff meetings. But here, you need to do it. Here, you need to be creative to get FAU to be on College Football Live, especially in the offseason. Until you have a chance to win, you can’t get publicity for recruiting. You can’t get the logo out there, unless you’re creative. The logo is out there for Alabama and USC.”
You clearly know what people have said about you in the past. Did you come into this job with any sort of approach of wanting to prove you’re different?
LK: “No, because I don’t care. This is probably bad in the big picture of what the perception of you is nationally. I don’t do things to try and create a perception of positivity. I don’t do what most people do. ‘Boy, if I do this, it’ll get in the paper. If I do this, it’ll be positive and they’ll write about it. I’m going to go out of the way to say how changed I am so people think he’s so changed.’ Anything I say in an interview is exactly what I’m thinking or is what is going on. That’s how I am. That’s probably not great advice to give someone young in the profession. They should probably do coachspeak.
“Anything I say in an interview is exactly what I’m thinking or is what is going on. That’s how I am. That’s probably not great advice to give someone young in the profession. They should probably do coachspeak.”
“I watch people go to charity events and post how they’re at them so they can get credit for them. That’s not me. I probably would have a better national perception if I was like that. But I’ve always thought, when I see people you can kind of tell are like that, I call them politician coaches. Or you see something, and that’s pretty phony because I can tell he’s mic’d up for practice and that’s not how a coach normally acts. He’s acting because he’s mic’d up. And players know that.”
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You’ve said in the past that being a small college town celebrity in Knoxville or Tuscaloosa can be difficult, while you loved anonymity in L.A. What’s it like in Boca Raton?
LK: “Let’s say I went to a restaurant here or get a haircut. There’s a good chance no one is going to say a word to me from the moment I leave my house to when I get home. If I went to a restaurant, 80 percent wouldn’t even know who Lane Kiffin is. I like that. But that fits who I am. There’s nothing phony about me. A lot of people like to go where everyone knows them and everyone comes up to them and look how famous I am. They really don’t want to be having the conversations with people, but they are because this person is going to tell me how good I am. I like this better. I like to be able to go eat and go where I want to go.
“In Knoxville — and it is what it is, every place is different — it was a little overwhelming to me at first, because I didn’t know anything about it at all. California is California. Even the head coach of the Raiders, it’s nothing like the head coach at Tennessee. Nothing. The Raiders is like here. Part of the population doesn’t even know about football. L.A., they don’t care if you’re the head coach at USC. Half the people don’t even know that. I didn’t know anything like this when I got to Tennessee. Football-wise, I wasn’t overwhelmed, coming from the NFL, from SC.
“… I was in shock of, whoa, there isn’t even a chance (of going out); 99 percent of the people know you. There was a five-month span, I didn’t go to a grocery store, restaurant, nothing. I was just overwhelmed. The part that was hard for me.”
Going from 90,000-seat crowds in the SEC to a place like this, what is that change like?
LK: “That really doesn’t matter. Obviously it’s totally different. I’m so trained on certain things. I have earphones when I get off the bus at visiting stadiums, because I’m trained that when the bus pulls up, there’s going to be 10,000 people there for two reasons: To yell something at Nick Saban and Lane Kiffin. … I was trained.
“I get off now, and there’s four people, and they’re two sets of parents of our players that made the road trip. My brother was at Ole Miss, we get off now and joke that it’s like going to a high school game for recruiting. It doesn’t take long to get into the games, because there’s no traffic. That’s a nice part of it.”
(Top photo: Jasen Vinlove / USA TODAY Sports)
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