Alabama Crimson Tide

Why a 'Bama title would guarantee Kiffin runs his own program again

Published Jan. 7, 2016 7:08 p.m. ET

Stewart Mandel

If Alabama beats Clemson on Monday night, the cameras will undoubtedly home in on Tide coach Nick Saban as he stands on center stage, hoisting his fifth national championship trophy.

Somewhere off to the side will be the latest offensive coordinator to help Saban reach the sport's pinnacle. That anonymity won't last. If Lane Kiffin helps Alabama win a national championship, he will be back running his own program a year from now.

College football's former bad boy has spent the past two seasons quietly rehabilitating his tarnished image while showing off the offensive acumen that helped earn him three NFL or college head-coaching jobs before the age of 35. His stint has doubled as a de facto head-coaching internship, learning the nuances of how to run a program by observing the master himself, Saban.

"I don't think anyone would ever answer the question, 'I don't want to be a head coach,'" he said last week in Dallas. "When and if that time comes, I know I'll be much better prepared than I was before."

Kiffin, 40, is in the second season of a three-year contract he signed with Alabama. It's believed he has little interest in taking an NFL coordinator job, and there's no obvious upgrade in college from the job he has now.

Many initially assumed his and Saban's marriage wouldn't last longer than a year given their disparate personalities and occasional philosophical clashes. But Saban's pro-style offense has unquestionably benefited from Kiffin's incorporation of new up-tempo and motion elements.

"When you look at the job he's done for us, how he's managed our offense with different personnel each year and how he's been able to adapt and grow, I'd say it's just a matter of time before he's a head coach again," Saban said last week.

The Tide have achieved consecutive SEC championships and College Football Playoff invitations during his tenure, and while 'Bama's dominant defense headlines the 2015 squad, Kiffin's imprint has been all over two dramatically different offenses.

Last season, he developed career backup and former running back Blake Sims into the nation's seventh-rated passer. He tailored his offense to get the ball as much as possible to gifted receiver Amari Cooper, who'd caught just 45 passes as a sophomore. In 2014, Cooper hauled in 124 for 1,727 yards and 16 touchdowns, garnering a trip to New York as one of three Heisman finalists.

A year later, 'Bama leaned heavily on Heisman winner Derrick Henry, who carried the ball at least 26 times -- and as many as 46 -- in seven of the Tide's last nine regular-season games. All the while, though, Kiffin helped restore confidence in former Florida State transfer quarterback Jake Coker, who quietly completed at least 65 percent of his passes in eight of nine games prior to the playoff.

In last week's playoff semifinal rout of Michigan State, Coker took things to a whole other level, completing 83.3 percent of his throws (25 of 30) for a season-high 286 yards -- which was exactly Kiffin's plan going in, sensing that even Henry would have trouble against the Spartans' stout run defense. (He finished with 20 carries for 75 yards.)

"They had a month to get ready for the Heisman Trophy winner," Kiffin said of the Spartans. "It's just natural as a coordinator. All the attention is going to be stopping [Henry]. They're a run-stopping defense anyway; we'd seen that on tape, that's what they were going to do. ... We knew that in order to win this game, it would come down to Jake making plays."

With Henry's Heisman win last month, Kiffin in his past four full seasons has now coached players who finished sixth (USC's Matt Barkley in 2011), fourth (Marqise Lee in 2012), third (Cooper in '14) and first (Henry in '15) in the voting.

Yet he's garnered little recent interest from ADs, who hold understandable reservations. Kiffin did not leave on good terms at any of his three previous stops, famously jettisoning Tennessee after one 7-6 season with a bizarre late-night news conference. The program later endured NCAA sanctions stemming from his brief tenure.

At USC, he engendered controversy for, among other things, accusations of a student manager deflating footballs; accusations of changing a player's jersey number on special teams; and sparring with Trojans beat writers over their reporting of injuries. More pertinently, sanction-riddled USC imploded on the field after a promising 10-2 mark in his second season, plummeting from a preseason No. 1 ranking to 7-6 in 2012.

A month into the next season, AD Pat Haden fired him at the airport. Saban, who shares the same agent as Kiffin (Jimmy Sexton), offered him a cushy landing spot that winter.

"I made a lot of mistakes [as a head coach], which were focusing completely on football and just worried about football and the X's and O's of it," he said. "Then you see what [Saban] does. ... He really is the CEO of the program, and the kids understand that process and what he's about."

"The thing you've got to remember about Lane," said Saban, "is that his first head coaching job came before a lot of guys get their first coordinator job."

Having spent considerable time around Kiffin in his former jobs, and after spending parts of two days around him in Dallas, it's plainly obvious he's consciously become more polished. Save for an awkward joke about Ohio State's Ezekiel Elliott, he could not have been more earnest and serious during interviews.

"I have a great job," he said in Dallas, "and any time there's any thinking any different, I just remind myself how many people would want to be the offensive coordinator for Nick Saban."

Two of Saban's former offensive coordinators, Jimbo Fisher (at LSU) and Jim McElwain (at Alabama), parlayed their success into head-coaching jobs. Kiffin is making a convincing case to rejoin their ranks in 2017.

Stewart Mandel is a senior college sports columnist for FOXSports.com. He covered college football and basketball for 15 years at Sports Illustrated. You can follow him on Twitter @slmandel and Facebook. Send emails and Mailbag questions to Stewart.Mandel@fox.com.