By KACE KIESCHNICK, Tiger Rag Staff Reporter
When No. 21 LSU (6-3, 3-3 Southeastern Conference) and No. 6 Texas (7-2, 4-2 SEC) take the field at 6:30 p.m. in Tiger Stadium on Saturday, it will not just be a conference showdown with playoff implications.
Nor will it just be the emotional final step out of the “Death Valley” tunnel for the Tiger seniors.
It will also be a reunion for two of the premier offensive minds in college football and longtime friends, who got their start 25 years ago on the same staff at USC.
LSU coach Lane Kiffin, 51, and Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian, 52, go “way back,” as Sarkisian described this week. They first met on Pete Carroll’s first USC staff in 2001. Kiffin was a first-year tight end coach for the Trojans, and Sarkisian was a graduate assistant helping offensive coordinator Norm Chow coach the quarterbacks.
Ever since that first season together at USC, Kiffin and Sarkisian have followed an intertwined career path and developed a deep personal connection, something Sarkisian said will make Saturday’s prime-time matchup all the more sweet, or bittersweet depending on what happens.
“I always go back to, something coach Carroll used to talk to us a lot about,” Sarkisian said at his Monday press conference. “You like, you love competing against your friends, because there’s nothing more gratifying than beating your friends. “I’m sure Lane feels the same way. We were raised kind of the same way in the profession.”
That tutelage under Carroll lasted six seasons for Kiffin – coaching alongside Sarkisian for five of them. After one year with the tight ends, Kiffin spent two seasons as the wide receivers coach before eventually adding passing game coordinator in 2004 and offensive coordinator in 2005. Sarkisian, meanwhile, spent their first three seasons together with the quarterbacks, but left to fill the same role for the Oakland Raiders in 2004. After one season in the pros, he rejoined Kiffin and Carroll at USC.
At just 31 years old, it was then Kiffin’s turn to try his hand with the Raiders. He became the youngest head coach in the NFL with Oakland in 2007, and Sarkisian replaced him as Carroll’s offensive coordinator at USC – the first of many times Sarkisian would follow Kiffin at a job for various reasons.
Kiffin was saddled with the selection by aging and slipping owner Al Davis of LSU quarterback JaMarcus Russell with the top pick in the 2007 NFL draft, a decision he opposed and a pick warned against by many NFL draft experts at the time, particularly Chris Landry in Baton Rouge. Kiffin went 4-12 in his first season as Russell became one of the most notorius first pick busts in NFL history. Kiffin was fired after a 1-3 start to his second season.
Sarkisian and Kiffin both took their first college head coaching jobs in 2009 – Kiffin at Tennessee and Sarkisian at Washington, which lost to LSU 31-23 in the season opener that season at home.
Kiffin infamously left the Volunteers after one successful 7-6 season, after inheriting a 5-7 team, to replace Carroll at USC. Carroll left for the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, where he coached for 13 seasons. Sarkisian was also linked as a possible candidate for USC, but remained in Washington – partially, because he did not want to leave after just one year, like Kiffin.
It was in the Pacific-10 Conference (and Pacific-12 Conference) that the two up-and-coming offensive head coaches had their first head-to-head bouts. Sarkisian’s Huskies got the better of Kiffin in their first meeting, a 32-31 battle in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in 2010 that ended with a game-winning 32-yard Washington field goal as time expired. In 2011, Kiffin made a statement against his old friend, leading the Trojans to a 40-17 win at the Coliseum. In their final face off in 2012, USC again took care of Washington, 24-14, in Seattle.
Kiffin’s improvement against Sarkisian was not indicative of his trajectory as the Trojan’s head coach, however. After starting 8-5 in year one and improving to 10-2 in his second season at the helm, USC finished 7-6 in 2012, losing five of its last six games. Kiffin got off to a 3-2 start in 2013, losing his first two conference games, and he was fired hours after a 62-41 loss at Arizona State.
The following off-season, Sarkisian replaced Kiffin as coach at USC. After going 9-4 in his first season in 2014, Sarkisian was asked to take an indefinite leave of absence and then fired after he reportedly showed up to a pre-practice meeting intoxicated. Several other alcohol-related incidents from his time at Washington were made public before he was fired after a 3-2 start in 2015. He immediately checked into a residential treatment facility and has been sober ever since.
During Sarkisian’s brief stint back at USC, Kiffin found the next legendary coach the pair could learn from – Alabama coach Nick Saban.
Saban hired Kiffin as his offensive coordinator for the 2014 season in one of Saban’s many reclamation projects. Kiffin was not getting a lot of offers at the time after the USC firing.
Two years later, Saban brought on Sarkisian to be an offensive analyst for the 2016 season, reuniting the two former coaching partners for what would be one final season together – for the time being. And once again Sarkisian replaced Kiffin as offensive coordinator for the national championship against Clemson. Kiffin had accepted a job to become the head coach at Florida Atlantic as Alabama was entering the 2016 playoffs. He had plans to work at both places, but Saban grew tired of Kiffin’s erratic and non-focused behavior in the first week of the playoffs and let him go. Sarkisian did well with the offense, but Alabama lost the title game, 35-31, to Clemson.
“I think coach Carroll had a big impact on us both in our time with him,” Sarkisian said. “Our journeys went the way they went, and then we end up together for a year at Alabama in 2016. And then there’s this influence of Nick Saban on both of our careers.”
Kiffin and Sarkisian then went their separate ways. Sarkisian became offensive coordinator of the Atlanta Falcons for two seasons in 2017 and ’18 before returning to Alabama to be Saban’s OC in 2019 and ’20. Kiffin carved out a successful three-season stint at FAU and was hired to lead Ole Miss in 2020. Sarkisian made his way back to the Southeastern Conference and took over at Texas a year later.
It was also around that time that Sarkisian’s and Kiffin’s friendship helped foster a transformation in Kiffin’s life. Kiffin said that in January of 2021, he made the decision to get sober.
“A major change in my life was getting sober almost six years ago, and he (Sarkisian) was a big part of that,” Kiffin said on Monday. “I owe him a lot for that and will always be appreciative for that.”
Kiffin has been very candid about his years of drinking problems that he said led to his divorce in 2016. Sarkisian was again able to offer his support and experience in his own journey through two divorces and the trek to sobriety. Sarkisian has publicly expressed his pride in Kiffin’s growth, and the two’s personal development has helped translate to on-field stability and success in their previously tumultuous careers.
Sarkisian has gone 55-22 into his fifth season at Texas, and Kiffin was 55-19 in his six years at Ole Miss and is 6-3 to start his LSU tenure.
Sarkisian said there was no possible way that those two young coaches could have ever expected their interwoven, unpredictable careers to go the way they had and end up at this point – on opposing sidelines of Tiger Stadium with College Football Playoff hopes hanging in the balance.
“Both of us end up at two premier programs in the country with great players and great support, great fan bases,” he said of the two border schools. “We’re both very fortunate. We’re both very blessed to be in the positions that we’re in.”
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