Kiffin watch: the legend of Junior

Quite an amazing article on Lane Kiffin in Sports Illustrated.  Here’s a taste of what you’ll find:

1.  The reason he took the Raiders job was to polish his resume.

… Before his time in Oakland, where he produced a 5–15 record, Kiffin had coordinated Pete Carroll’s offense and recruiting program at USC, and he’d always planned to return to college football. Even as a high school quarterback in Bloomington, Minn., where he called his own plays, and later as a seldom-used backup at Fresno State, where he surrendered his last year of eligibility to help coach the offense, Kiffin had dreamed of leading a big-time college program. Davis might or might not have succeeded in raising questions about Kiffin’s character, but hiring him in the first place allowed him to include head coaching experience on his résumé, a prerequisite at some schools.

“Lane took that job because, as he told me, it’s hard to get a good college job unless you’ve been a head coach somewhere,” says Monte. “He’d been spoiled at Southern Cal, and the only job he wanted was a head job at a big school. He didn’t have any interest in working his way up at small schools.”

2.  Addition by subtraction.

… Only a few weeks after accepting the job, Kiffin was already crowing about the coaches he’d stolen from rival schools in the Southeastern Conference. He called it addition by subtraction. “I could’ve gone to places like Oregon and Michigan and found great coaches to hire, but that’s only addition to us,” he explains. “By finding them at SEC schools and taking them away, that’s addition by subtraction.”

“I have to play Alabama every year,” Kiffin says. “I basically stole their best guy. I have to play South Carolina. I took their best guy. I took Mississippi State’s. Ed Orgeron was going to be LSU’s recruiting coordinator. I went and got him. I also got Eddie Gran—he’s the coach who recruited players like Cadillac Williams and Ronnie Brown for Auburn. I like to joke that we’d have the best recruiting class in the country right now if I’d spent as much time recruiting players as I’ve spent recruiting coaches.”

3.  Junior is underpaid.  By a lot.  By choice.

… Kiffin is making $2 million a year, a salary that ranks him seventh or eighth among the 12 SEC head coaches, says Mike Hamilton, Tennessee’s men’s athletic director. Kiffin might’ve negotiated a wage closer to the $4 million that Nick Saban earns at Alabama or the $3.65 million that Meyer made last year at Florida, but he agreed to accept less if the university budgeted more to pay for his assistants.

I’m getting tired of posting about the guy, but it’s impossible not to react viscerally to crap like this.

And if Mike Hamilton went into the job negotiation truly believing that Junior was worth $3-4 million a year, he’s the most incompetent AD in the country.

I do like finding out whom Layla Kiffin was named after, though.