Lane Kiffin has gone from a pariah to a head coaching candidate all over again

The Lane Kiffin who brings Alabama’s offense into Saturday night’s game at LSU (8 p.m. ET, CBS) is only 41, but he’s already lived a couple of football lives.

When Kiffin was USC’s 31-year-old offensive coordinator in 2007, Al Davis hired him away to be the Raiders’ head coach. Davis fired him after a 5-15 record in less than a season and a half. He took over at Tennessee after that, and he left in the night for the head job at USC after one underwhelming year. After Kiffin’s USC tenure ended with a mid-year firing, he landed in Tuscaloosa. And that’s how we got here.

Saban’s Alabama offense is brilliant. It doesn’t hurt to work almost exclusively with four- and five-star talent, but Kiffin’s done some good work on his own. Now the Tide are national title favorites with a true freshman quarterback, and Kiffin’s chances of getting another head coaching gig only get better by the month.

Here are some things about Kiffin.

It doesn’t seem like that’ll be the case at Alabama, where Kiffin’s gotten rave reviews and led offenses that have done well and won a ton. But it’s sure been like that before.

When Davis fired Kiffin in Oakland, he held a press conference that lasted nearly an hour. If you’re looking for some remarkable public hating, watch it:

“I didn’t hire the person I thought I was hiring,” Davis said, and he went on:

I think he conned me like he conned all you people ... I reached a point where I felt that the whole staff were fractionalized, that the best thing to do to get this thing back was to make a change. It hurts because I picked the guy. I picked the wrong guy.

That’s Al Davis attempting to claim the moral high ground on Kiffin, by the way.

After Oakland, Kiffin went to Knoxville, where he went 7-6 in 2009. His old school, USC, offered him the top job, and Kiffin took it. His resignation announcement from Tennessee was a whale of a scene.

Tennessee fans took to the streets and chanted “Fuck you, Kiffin” (NSFW):

Kiffin had some good moments at USC, but he eventually got fired there, too. USC’s athletic director did the deed on an airplane tarmac in the middle of the night, just as USC was getting back from a road loss. Kiffin’s called it the low point of his career.

He finger-gunned Tennessee fans who booed him when he returned to Neyland Stadium in 2014 with Bama.

This year, he beat the Vols by 39 and threw his Alabama visor to their fans:

This is right out of the Kiffin trolling playbook. (There’s more to it, including various recruiting-related trolls.) And he’s done the same to USC. Here he is throwing candy to some Trojans fans who were razzing him before this year’s Tide-USC game in Arlington:

After he beat his former team 52-6, Kiffin tweeted with extremely direct references to his early morning USC firing at Los Angeles International Airport three years earlier:

This is Kiffin’s thing.

That Alabama has a good offense is not strictly a testament to its coordinator. Lots of coaches, with Nick Saban’s guidance and the Tide’s talent, could put up big numbers.

But Kiffin’s made a mark. Saban hired him before 2014 to update Alabama’s offense for a college football world that had grown heavier on spread schemes and run-pass options, and Kiffin’s made it work pretty perfectly.

Freshman quarterback Jalen Hurts has been able to keep things simple and become a dominant runner. And Alabama’s offense, more broadly, has retained its ability to run over you while adding an enhanced ability to run around you.

The Tide score 44 points per game, ninth-most in the sport. They’re third in the country in Offensive S&P+, an advanced stat that adjusts for strength of schedule.

Kiffin has had a reputation as a strong recruiter. He’s still young, and he’s on his way to his third College Football Playoff in three years, and maybe a second national title in two.

Saban has sort of nursed him back to health, and other coaches have seen that and noticed. Kiffin’s also-now-fired successor at USC, Steve Sarkisian, came onboard as an offensive analyst earlier this year. If Kiffin leaves, Sarkisian could replace him, or Saban could find any number of capable coaches to fill the void.

Kiffin’s become a cool college football personality. Alabama’s buses left him behind after last year’s title win against Clemson, which was cute.

So was this moment with his kid:

And so is his Twitter account, which is far goofier than his public image was just a few years ago.

Kiffin as the silly warrior and go-lucky assistant for Nick Saban’s juggernaut Tide isn’t a role that would’ve made sense for him six years ago. But it’s where he is now, and from here, things look awfully good.