'Keep Him Away From the Sorority Girls': A New Book About Lane Kiffin's Time at Alabama Details Plenty of Off-Field Drama

No book has ever been more of an auto-purchase than Lane Being Lane by John Talty, which produced this excerpt featured in Vanity Fair. I'd honestly pay $100 to find out what else he's got in there about Lane Kiffin working under Nick Saban.

Things ended poorly for Kiffin in Tuscaloosa, but it's a miracle he and Saban were able to work together for the three years they did. There might not be a more disjointed marriage of a head coach and coordinator in the history of college football.

As for the aforementioned poor ending:

Vanity Fair — In fact, the closer Saban looked at the circumstances, the more pissed off he became. On the surface, it had been a convincing 24–7 win over Washington that sent the Crimson Tide to another national championship game. But a 17-point win masked how off-kilter and sloppy the offense looked against the overmatched Huskies. It wouldn’t be enough against Clemson.

As Saban spent hours rewatching the game film, what he saw disturbed him. Kiffin had called plays the team hadn’t practiced. It wasn’t the first time he had done that—it was almost like a party trick for Kiffin to draw something up during a game—but the savant playmaker was off his game. “Some of the coaches were upset he was throwing plays out there that weren’t scripted,” running back Derrick Gore says. “That was just a Lane thing.” It wasn’t limited to coaches either. Veteran offensive players went to Saban and vocalized their concerns about Kiffin’s focus that week.

All that, plus Kiffin’s antics leading up to the game made Saban realize it was time to move on.

“How do we score twenty-four points against Washington when they suck?” Saban told a confidant. “He’s obviously thinking about FAU and he’s not thinking about us.”

Early that next morning, Saban made the decision: “I’m firing the cocksucker.”

Still, it was a delicate dance as Jimmy Sexton represented both sides of the equation. Saban didn’t want the situation spinning out of control. As Saban worked with Alabama administrators and close confidants on the wording of what was to come, he was crystal clear that there’d be hell to pay if anyone tipped off Kiffin about what he was planning.

Eventually, the involved parties framed it as a mutual decision to allow Kiffin to focus on his new FAU head coach responsibilities. But everyone involved with the Alabama football program knew it was a firing. “The guy who likes publicizing he got his ass ripped more than anybody is Lane. That was for good reason,” says a former Alabama assistant. “He’s the only coordinator in the history of the game that’s been fired on a Monday before the national championship game.”

For whatever you think of the guy, we really do all owe Lane Kiffin a tremendous thanks for the incredible content he's given us over the last two decades. We haven't found anyone else in this profession which tends to produce paranoid football robots who can give us a scintilla of the unceasing material Lane does.

What a couple weeks for Kiffin: he's fighting in court to roster NFL players while preparing for his first game at LSU following one of the wildest coaching departures we've ever seen and this book will come out the week he has to go back to Ole Miss. Just another day aboard the Lane Train.