There may not be a more captivating character in college sports than LSU football coach Lane Kiffin.
Love him. Hate him. Mock him. Admire him. Whatever your opinion, looking away is nearly impossible.
In a sport overflowing with oversized personalities, Kiffin remains a category unto himself: part offensive savant, part internet troll, part reality show protagonist. One week he's delivering a one-liner on national television that eventually finds its way into a federal lawsuit. The next, he's turning a Saturday night in Baton Rouge into a celebrity spectacle, with rap stars Lil Wayne and Boosie roaming the sidelines.
College football has never struggled to produce larger-than-life figures. But no one embodies the sport's chaos, absurdity and unpredictability
quite like Kiffin.
That tension, and the irresistible pull of a coach who seems perpetually one headline away from his next controversy, is at the heart of Lane Being Lane: The Story of Lane Kiffin, College Football's Agent of Chaos, the first deeply reported biography of one of the sport's most fascinating figures.
Long before Kiffin was baiting rival coaches, reinventing offenses or dominating social media timelines, he was a stubborn, self-assured teenager in Minnesota who was convinced he knew better than the adults around him.
In this exclusive excerpt from bestselling author and national college sports reporter John Talty's forthcoming biography, readers get an early glimpse of the traits that would eventually make Kiffin one of the most polarizing and entertaining figures in American sports, as a young Lane hilariously pushes his high school coaches to their limits.
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In Minnesota, life was pretty good as Monte Kiffin’s son.
If Lane shied away from that moniker in New York, he embraced it more at Jefferson High School in Bloomington. He was still guarded and cautious of others’ intentions. That wall was still up — from now on, it never truly went away — and he’d only show the truest version of himself when he felt he could really trust a person. He was aware, though, that there were perks that came with his dad being a critical part of the Minnesota Vikings organization. As time went on, he became more open to showing that side of his life to his favored football teammates. He brought the most talented ones to the Vikings’ facilities to watch the team practice and get some tutelage from his father.
“Because of that affiliation, he got lots of respect,” says Jon Leverenz, a Jefferson assistant coach. “They looked to Lane as their [team] leader just because of who he was. He was a mischief maker and practical joker and loved to have fun, but that didn’t deter the boys from following him and doing what they needed to on the field.”
Lane tried to borrow from the NFL and bring it back to the high school level wherever he could. As the quarterback on the sophomore team, he decided he didn’t want to wear hip pads anymore because more and more Vikings players were eschewing them. The only problem was, in Minnesota at that time, rules dictated that high school players had to wear hip pads. Lane was undeterred and showed up to a game without them, forcing the head coach to take them from a reserve player and make him wear them.
The following year, while trying to become the varsity team’s starting quarterback, Lane wanted to change the offense’s cadence to how the Vikings did it. When head coach Stan Skjei questioned why, Lane answered simply, “Because it’s cooler.” Shockingly, that rationale didn’t win over the longtime Jefferson coach.
“There was just never a dull moment coaching Lane,” Skjei says.
It helped that Skjei had known Monte Kiffin since 1970 when Monte successfully recruited future NFL first-round pick Tom Ruud out of Jefferson to Nebraska. They had kept in touch over the years as Monte worked his way up the ranks, and it was like no time had passed when the Kiffin family moved to Bloomington. There was a Midwestern kinship between the two football coaches, both in their joy for and seriousness about the game. Even before Skjei was coaching his son, Monte was the kind of guy who would make himself available whenever he could to talk football.
Just like he did in New York, Monte wasn’t trying to step on another coach’s toes and instead encouraged him to do what was necessary with his son. He told Skjei two things: Lane was going to drive him crazy, and it was important he ran a tight ship with him. Monte admitted he himself wasn’t very good at doing that.
After another of Lane’s antics, a laughing yet serious Monte made a confession to Skjei that, in many ways, seemed to explain it all.
“Stan,” Monte said, “I think I just haven’t said no enough to Lane.”
As a junior, Lane started at safety instead of his preferred quarterback position. He had the football knowledge to be the starting quarterback, but not yet the maturity. He was so strong-willed in what he believed, a key character trait that would serve as a blessing and a curse in his life, and he didn’t want to conform.
Take this example: Before one game, Skjei noticed six of his defensive players had towels hanging out of their pants, which was very much not part of the uniform guidelines the coaches expected everyone to follow. They were all the rage at the time, with cool players like Deion Sanders using them during games. When he asked one of the players where he even got the towel, the player told him, “Lane lined them up for us.”
In reality, it was Robin Kiffin who acquired the streamer towels for Lane and five of his teammates. They were black with skulls and crossbones and personalized with each player’s number on them. It wasn’t simply that Skjei didn’t want players using them; he certainly didn’t want just his defensive backfield having them. Despite their coach’s aversion to them, Lane and teammates like Steve Thompson, a starting cornerback, decided they still wanted to wear them. They figured that if they hid them during warm-ups, what was the worst that would happen if they busted them out for the actual game? So they did, the team won, and all seemed well.
Until, that is, the bus carrying the team home came to a hill near where the team would be dropped off. Everyone who wore a towel had to exit and run up and down the hill. The obvious intent was to punish the players enough that they wouldn’t do it again, but Lane’s mind was still turning with possibilities. He asked Skjei whether he’d make them run hills every time they wore towels, and the head coach made it clear that he absolutely would.
And for the Jaguars’ next game, Lane and his defensive backs wore the towels again. And again, they were forced to run up and down the hill. This broke everyone’s resolve to keep wearing them. Except for Lane.
After the third week of wearing the towel, this time by himself, the bus again neared its drop-off spot.
“Hey, coach,” Lane said, “don’t we have to stop the bus?” He couldn’t help but needle the coaches about his expected punishment.
“Everybody on the bus is rolling laughing when he says that,” Thompson says.
Lane ran those hills for nearly an hour that night after playing the whole game. But that was the end of the towels.
Excerpted from the book “Lane Being Lane: The Story of Lane Kiffin, College Football’s Agent of Chaos.” From Harper Books. Reprinted with permission.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Long before Lane Kiffin stared down the SEC, he was a high school coach's headache
