Lane Kiffin’s unenthusiastic FAU promo video actually worked

By now, you’ve seen Florida Atlantic University head coach Lane Kiffin’s dull, unenthusiastic, and overall awkward promo video he released for FAU football before Signing Day. If you haven’t, well, here you go.

The video was released from FAU’s official Twitter account, but was later deleted.

Videos aside, Kiffin managed to put together FAU’s best-ever recruiting class on Signing Day, featuring 15 three-stars, and 23 total members. It finished 71st in the country per the 247Sports Composite. Here’s Underdog Dynasty on the class.

The coaching staff’s best work might have been what they were able to do in Jacksonville. Three star safety Ahmon Ross was a former Miami commit and the Owls had to hold off USF to land him. Three star cornerback Quran Hafiz was another steal for FAU as held multiple P5 offers. Hafiz will be an early enrollee.

I mentioned before how the criteria for guaranteed success for G5 schools in Florida is landing multiple players ranked 50-150 in Florida. Hafiz (124) and Ross (82) was able to give FAU two players that fit that criteria for the class of 2017.

Although Lane Kiffin’s resume as a head coach isn’t necessarily the best, no one can argue his recruiting chops and this class is another example of Kiffin’s ability to get it done in February and apparently FAU is still trying add more players for this class 2017.

As it turns out, it looks like the shoddy quality of the promotional video was a stunt in itself — Kiffin told reporters on Signing Day that the video was shot poorly on purpose.

It’s about a month later, we now are hearing more on the idea behind video, as the Owls’ head coach explained the premise behind it all to Fox Sports’ Colin Cowherd on Wednesday.

“We said, ‘If we just put out a normal, exciting video … nobody’s really going to play that outside of Boca (Raton). So let’s do the worst one ever so that everyone will put it on TV and say look how bad this is,’” Kiffin told Cowherd as transcribed by SEC Country. “Then all of the sudden, we got publicity for the program. And you’ve got all kinds of people looking up FAU that don’t even know what FAU is.”

I mean, I can’t say making it poorly on purpose wasn’t a possibility, given that this was his face during part of it, but...

To be fair, I’m not sure if Kiffin’s been quite the most enthusiastic guy, outside of him celebrating Alabama touchdowns early while on the sidelines, but one could see in this video how it could have been a bit dramatized.

Just two days before Signing Day, Kiffin’s class was ranked 82nd in the country, so he was able to bump it up 11 spots.

Nice work, coach.