The many lives of Lane Kiffin: 'I'm really trying to make it not about me'

"E60: The Many Lives of Lane Kiffin," debuts Wednesday, at 7 p.m. ET on ESPN. An extended version will be available afterward on the ESPN App. Fans can also watch the program in the official streaming hub.

The life of a football coach is one spent constantly searching for a better pathway. That's why they spend such a significant percentage of their lives sitting in dark rooms, watching the same play over and over again. Searching for an opening. Scanning their opponents for even the tiniest cracks or tells. A constant, never-ending pursuit of anything and everything that will aid their ultimate goal of forward progress.

For Lane Kiffin, everything is game film. How he works his job, now in his sixth season as head football coach at Ole Miss, in arguably the greatest era of success in the program's 132-year history. How he works on himself, having turned 50 in May and down that many pounds, thanks to a strict diet, a self-imposed alcohol ban and a daily dose of hot yoga. And how he works with his family, reconnecting with three children and even his ex-wife, all while hiring his brother as an assistant coach, with whom he shares a backyard border, and having said goodbye to each of his parents over the past two summers.

He studies it all. Just as diligently as he has studied Saturday's opponent, SEC and Magnolia Bowl rival LSU (Saturday, 3:30 p.m. ET, ABC). And that study isn't limited to the present day. It also includes his past. Perhaps the most public, polarizing, but also misunderstood past of any football coach of this century. A biography that is much too complicated to be told in mere chapters but rather would require entire volumes.

Fresno State backup QB-turned-undergrad assistant coach. USC assistant-turned-then-youngest-ever NFL head coach. Tennessee head coach-turned-Big Orange public enemy No. 1. USC head coach-turned-guy fired on the tarmac. Nick Saban mentee-turned-guy dismissed the week of the natty. Ole Miss head coach-turned-second chance father.

Kiffin goes into detail about each of those stops in "E60: The Many Lives of Lane Kiffin," a story that ultimately lands in his current life.

"I think there's things in life that you do, that you make mistakes," Kiffin explains. "I call them self-inflicted wounds. Then there's things, you actually are really trying to go above and beyond to do the right thing, and it just doesn't work."

Those mistakes tend to overshadow those right things. At some point over these six years in Oxford, while most were still rewatching Al Davis's one-hour slideshow presentation explaining "I didn't hire the person I thought I was hiring" in 2008 or Tennessee students setting mattresses ablaze to chants of "F--- Lane Kiffin!" while the family fled Knoxville for Southern California one year later, the coach so many have loved to hate evolved. He grew up. The punk kid turned into ... an elder statesman?

"It didn't use to bother me because I was kind of like, man, I'm doing this my way and I don't care what anybody thinks," Kiffin says of how people perceive him. "I think as I've gotten older now and kids, they grow older, I've cared a little more just because I'm like, that's your legacy, like what people say, you know?

"I used to just be like, hey, you know what? If you don't work here, your opinion doesn't matter. So what these people write around the country, not just fans, but even writers that don't truly cover us and they want to write Lane Kiffin's like this and he's so terrible and he doesn't care about this, and he's got no respect for authority and all these things, they don't know. That did not bother me at all. And now, I just would like to change that narrative really for legacy and for kids and grandkids."

How does one do that? By looking back on their time as one of those kids. Kiffin was raised in locker rooms and on sidelines, the son of Monte Kiffin, aka the inventor of the Tampa 2 defense that helped the Tampa Bay Buccaneers win Super Bowl XXXVII. Lane was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1975, when Monte was the Cornhuskers' defensive coordinator under Tom Osborne; he then moved to Arkansas for the same role for Lou Holtz's Razorbacks. But the kid's first and greatest college football memories were during his father's only stint as a head coach, leading the NC State Wolfpack from 1980 to 1982. That's when little brother Chris was born.

From there, it was on to six different stops around the NFL as Lane moved into and through his teenage years. His mother, Robin, worked hard to create as normal a life as she could for Lane, Chris and sister Heidi. That meant celebrating Christmas in January and allowing the kids to stay up late on Monday nights, because if Monte wasn't coaching in the "Monday Night Football" game, he was home watching and the kids would watch with him.

"I think people probably just assume that Dad wasn't around because NFL coaches, they sleep in their office and all of that," Kiffin says. "But my dad always did whatever he could to be involved. That might be taking us to practice with him or coming home for dinner when other coaches weren't going home and just sleeping in their office. I think it probably would have been easier to just not care and just coach all the time and squeeze in family whenever you could fit it in, but that's never how he made us feel."

Robin would make sure to prolong those meals by offering after-dinner conversation topics, such as writing down three wishes and sharing them with the family for discussion. It was no easy task to keep Lane at the table, the perpetually moving and trouble-causing kid whom his mother lovingly referred to as "the helicopter."

"He earned that nickname for sure," Chris says with a laugh. Lane's younger brother moved to Oxford to join the Rebels' staff as a defensive assistant. He was his brother's defensive coordinator at Florida Atlantic in 2017. "He would blow into a room, create some sort of havoc, and then blow back out again before he got caught or hurt or something worse. But he didn't get away with it as much as he would have liked."

play

2:29

Lane Kiffin, Nick Saban reflect on coaching relationship at Bama

Lane Kiffin and Nick Saban reflect on their time coaching together at Alabama, offering a behind-the-scenes look.

That description sounds how many would characterize Lane's coaching career. So would he, admitting now that like so many -- OK, most -- other football coaches, game prep and ladder climbing at the stadium overwhelmed whatever ruins of a family life were back at the house.

For Kiffin, that house was in Manhattan Beach, purchased when he infamously bolted Tennessee for USC, and left behind -- with the family in it -- when he was even more infamously dismissed from the Trojans in a runway office meeting room at LAX four years later. Later that fall, Saban invited him to come to Tuscaloosa to help the Crimson Tide revamp their offense. That turned into an offensive coordinator gig.

"I went to Alabama, we had no idea what was going to happen there so they didn't move," Kiffin says of his wife, Layla, and their three kids (two daughters and a son). "I didn't know Alabama was going to go bad. So, then it was like, well, at that point we'll just stay and move to the next place. Well, that ends up not working out and we get divorced."

After three seasons and two national titles at Bama, he took the head coaching job at FAU. The kids would visit but not for long.

"It was definitely hard because I would call him every day after school, but he was just so busy during the season it was really hard," his son, Knox, remembers.

Adds daughter Landry: "I feel like I was still a little bit young to fully understand it, but I kind of always just thought of it like, oh, he's just at work."

Kiffin won a lot of games with the Owls, along with a pair of Conference USA titles. But when he talks about that oft-forgotten stop along his coaching path, the win-loss record is never mentioned. Instead, he tells stories about morning walks on the beaches of Boca Raton with his parents and Chris. They helped him reconnect with the idea of family -- and made him miss his own.

"You know, you have this obsession of work and being this youngest coach and the fastest moving and you've got to do all this," he says of his relationship with Layla and the kids. "I really felt like as I have looked back, I should have done that better."

He also acknowledges that when he was named Ole Miss coach on Dec. 9, 2019, given where his life was at the time, he was worried about the slower pace of a sleepy, isolated college town like Oxford. Now he sees that as a gift. A more methodical daily clock that created much more room for self-reflection, self-improvement and repairing severed ties. As he has become fond of saying, "I needed Oxford and Ole Miss more than they needed me."

In 2022, Landry moved in with her father, attending her senior year of high school in Oxford and enrolling at Ole Miss. No sooner had she arrived than his name was mentioned as the leading candidate for the job at Auburn. So she and her friends conjured up a slideshow of images of their good times in town, set to a song they knew would attach itself to his heartstrings and tear ducts.

"I just moved here to be with you and you're going to leave?" Landry said.

He did not.

play

2:44

Lane Kiffin shares his daughter's impact on his Ole Miss career

Lane Kiffin explains how his daughter, Landry, influenced his decision to continue coaching at Ole Miss.

Chris joined the staff in 2024 and moved into the house where Lane used to live. Lane moved all of a few hundred yards away, sharing that backyard border. Knox is a high school freshman in Oxford and ex-wife Layla has a place downtown. Middle child Presley is back in California, on the volleyball team at USC.

Monte, who had an office in the Ole Miss football facility next to his son's, died July 11, 2024. Robin died 11 months later. Kiffin says that his parents' final years, there in Oxford with him, weren't merely a gift. They were also the reason he gave up alcohol, so that "my dad could see me at my best."

When Chris was told what his big brother had said, he broke down crying, adding that Monte "had so much to do with helping Lane do that."

Now, the family dinners are back. Everyone sits around the very long kitchen table, parents and kids, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces. When dinner is over, Lane announces to the room that everyone needs to share their wishes.

Just like Mom used to do.

"I feel like a lot of my life decisions and time was about me. All about me," Kiffin says. "And I'm really trying to make it not about me. I've got a long way to go, but I've come a long way too."