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How Lane Kiffin got exactly what he wanted
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Lane Kiffin (Photo/Oakland Raiders)
In January of 2007, the Oakland Raiders were on the verge of hiring USC's offensive coordinator as their new head coach, but it wasn't Lane Kiffin they were after. No, before Al Davis fell in love with Kiffin, he was first enamored with his co-offensive coordinator at USC, Steve Sarkisian.
It made sense -- or at least more sense than Davis hiring Kiffin. Sarkisian had served as the Raiders' quarterbacks coach in 2004 and was familiar both to Davis and with the organization. After interviewing for the position, various media outlets reported that Sarkisian had been offered the job but turned it down. As part of that process, Sarkisian brought Kiffin, his choice to be his top offensive assistant were he to become the head coach, up to Oakland to talk to the team brass. It was after those conversations that Davis turned his attention to the Trojans' other offensive coordinator, making Kiffin the NFL's youngest ever head coach just days later.
At the time, there was speculation around the USC program that Kiffin took the Oakland job with the expectation that at some point he would be fired by Davis (as had happened to so many Raiders coaches before him) but in the process would increase his profile to the point where he could get a high-level college head coaching job afterwards. That's why no one was surprised when reports surfaced last year that Kiffin had been angling for the Arkansas job after Houston Nutt had been fired but before the Razorbacks hired Bobby Petrino from the Atlanta Falcons.
In fact, it was his play for the Arkansas job that seemed to upset Davis more than anything else that happened during Kiffin's tenure with the Raiders, cementing the frosty relationship between the two that eventually led to Kiffin's dismissal at the end of September. In a puzzling press conference the next day, Davis cited Kiffin's efforts to land the job in Fayetteville among a long list of reasons why Kiffin was fired. Of course, by then the Raiders organization had regressed to the point where most sensible people considered the head coaching position at Arkansas a much better job than the one Kiffin had in Oakland.
And now, after less than eight weeks on the job market, it appears Kiffin has what he wanted all along when he left USC in 2007: a college head coaching job at a major football school, in this case Tennessee. It's an even better job than the one at Arkansas he went after last year, enhanced by the fact that UT has a reputation for being patient with their coaches, having had only four in the last 44 years, and even after the Vols struggled in the last few years, the administration was hesitant to fire Philip Fulmer until the wheels fell off this season.
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