Former players share untold stories of Lane Kiffin's time at Alabama

Lane Kiffin is an enigma. The polarizing coach is among college football's brightest offensive minds but more often plays the role of the sport’s biggest troll.

Despite turning Ole Miss into an SEC contender in just three years, Kiffin is more apt to make headlines through his antics on social media than he is for anything the Rebels do on the field. That’s especially true in weeks like this one where the focus centers around his relationship with Alabama and his former boss, Nick Saban.

From 2014-16, Kiffin and Saban served as college football’s odd couple, producing three SEC titles and a national championship despite clashing in personalities. Kiffin changed Alabama’s offensive identity for the better, but his time as the Crimson Tide’s offensive coordinator was a cacophony of chaos filled with butt chewings, visor flips and premature touchdown celebrations.

Before Alabama squares off against Kiffin and Ole Miss on Saturday, Tide Illustrated dug up a few untold stories about the coach’s quirkier moments with the Crimson Tide.

Kiffin’s penchant for pushing Saban’s buttons is common knowledge, but the former offensive coordinator also had a habit of getting under his players’ skin during his time at Alabama. Perhaps no one knows that better than Montana Murphy, who served as a walk-on quarterback during Kiffin’s final year with the Crimson Tide in 2016.

Murphy’s low status on the depth chart made him an easy target. In fact, Kiffin hardly ever called him by his name, referring to him as either “new guy” or “Triscuit boy.” The latter comes from the daily errand Murphy was tasked with to make sure his coordinator had his favorite snack before practice.

“He always wanted his Triscuits, like the little crackers,” Murphy recalled. “He’d be like, ‘Hey, Triscuit boy, go get me some Triscuits from downstairs.’ I’d have to go down to the nutrition staff and be like ‘Coach Kiffin wants his Triscuits again.’ … If I ever came to meetings without them, he’d be pissed. It was just stuff like that. He was so different.”

Murphy wasn’t the only player subjected to snack runs either. Former Alabama quarterback David Cornwell remembers having to step out of a quarterback meeting to get Kiffin a chocolate smoothie during his first season with the Crimson Tide in 2014.

“I’m sitting there like, ‘Dude, I’m a scholarship, five-star quarterback as a freshman trying to learn your offense, and you’re going to send me for a shake mid-meeting?” Cornwell recalled. “I don’t know if he was testing me or what. He could have been trying to loosen me up, but I don’t want to think too deep about it. With Kiffin, it really could have been that he just wanted a shake.”

Or he could have been bored. Along with sending Murphy out for menial tasks Kiffin also concocted a few fool’s errands for the walk-on from time to time.

“We’d be in a meeting, and he’d be like ‘We need to tell the offensive line coach we’re blocking this scheme this way now,’ knowing that the coach is not around, not in the building,” Murphy recalled. “I walk around for 30 minutes, and I cannot find this guy anywhere in the facility. I come back to the meeting room, I sit down in my chair, and I don’t say anything. He goes, ‘Well did you tell him?’ I was like, ‘No sir, I couldn’t find him.’ He’s like ‘Well, what are you doing sitting here.’ I just got up and walked around the facility for another 20 or 30 minutes until meetings were over and then went out to practice.”

To this day, Cornwell and Murphy aren’t quite sure of the point behind Kiffin’s pranks. Although, while the trolling grew old at times, neither quarterback holds a grudge against their former coordinator.

“I do like Lane, and I appreciate him,” Murphy said with a slight laugh. “The way he handled himself, it did get under a lot of people’s skin, but a lot of people liked him. He is a likable guy, he’s just kind of a dick.”

Not everyone was as accepting of Kiffin’s quirky nature. Upon arriving at Alabama, the coordinator consistently rubbed wide receiver Robert Foster the wrong way, leading to a few heated back-and-forths during practice.

According to Cornwell, the feud lasted a couple of years before ultimately being settled with a race as Kiffin challenged Foster to a 100-yard dash that saw the coordinator begin with a 40-yard headstart. Foster, one of Alabama’s fastest players at the time, wasted no time accepting the challenge before enacting his revenge.

“Robert smoked him,” Cornwell said. “Robert wasn’t running for a race, he was running for two years of pent-up anger. I think it was for some kind of bet for like 100 pushups or 1,000 pushups. I think Robert stood there the whole time while Kiffin did it.”

While Foster and Kiffin never became super close, the race did a lot to cool the tempers. After a while, the arguments evolved into somewhat of a sarcastic friendship as the two traded barbs in a more civil manner.

“That was just so Kiffin,” Cornwell said. “He’s just different, and that's why it works. He makes it work, and that’s where you’ve got to give him credit. Like him, hate him, love him, whatever. He makes it work for him, and that’s just cool.”

The race against Foster wasn’t the only time Kiffin stretched his legs on the field. During the special teams portion of practice, the coordinator would routinely rope his quarterbacks into debuting new passing plays. The only problem was there was a shortage of receivers to throw to.

Alabama’s star wideouts generally used the period as a time to catch their breath while most of the reserves were involved in some sort of special teams package. Of course, that didn’t stop Kiffin, who rounded up the team’s ball boys while leading them himself as a makeshift receiving corps. While the former Fresno State quarterback kept himself in relatively good shape, the throwing sessions provided a bit of an awkward situation for Alabama’s passers.

“If you threw it too light, he’d be like, ‘Fire it in there. What are you doing,’” Cornwell recalled. “And if you threw one too hard, it would like hit him, and he’d be like, ‘What are you thinking?’ You had to find the perfect Kiffin speed to throw it.”

Kiffin’s receiving days were finally put to bed during the 2015 season as he tore his hamstring while running a route. Not wanting Saban to notice, the coordinator quickly had the injury tended to by trainers before braving out the rest of practice in pain.

“We had no idea if he was joking,” Cornwell said. “It was like, is he hurt? We kind of forgot about it because he played it off in a cool Kiffin way. I’m sure he was hurting so bad though because that was halfway through practice. It’s not like he can miss a period or miss a portion of practice.

“Sure enough two weeks later, he was like, ‘Y’all remember that route?’ We were like, ‘Yeah.’ He lifted up his sweatpants, and that’s when we saw it. It literally looked like he was shot with paintballs all the way up and down his leg. It was brutal, but that’s just Kiffin.”

Mischief and mayhem aside, the moment that Cornwell remembers most of Kiffin came while Alabama was preparing for Florida during his freshman season in 2014. During a quarterback meeting, Kiffin called Cornwell to the whiteboard and told him to take notes.

The offensive coordinator then proceeded to break down exactly how he was going to exploit Florida linebacker Antonio Morrison on a slant-and-go route. While Morrison was the Gators’ top tackler that season, Cornwell remembers Kiffin referring to him as “stiff,” stating his intentions to test the linebacker against speedy running back Kenyan Drake on Alabama’s first play with the ball.

“He’s like, ‘Kenyan’s going to run the slant-and-go, Blake [Sims] is going to throw it as he breaks on his slant, and it’s going to be a touchdown,’” Cornwell recalled. “I was like, ‘OK, man. We’ll see.’ Sure enough, we motion it out, slant-and-go, and Kenyan catches it for an 87-yard touchdown.”

“Kiffin didn’t demand respect with words or actions. He earned it with his play calls. Whether you liked him or hated him, everyone in that building knew this guy can call plays, and he was going to give us a chance to win with something the defense hasn’t seen before.”

At times Kiffin seems to toy with opposing defenses in the same manner he messes with coaches and players off the field, teasing them with tendencies on film only to set them up for a surprise wrinkle on game day. Cornwell calls him the greatest play caller he’s ever worked. Murphy still refers to him as a genius. While Kiffin’s personality provided mixed results in Tuscaloosa, his football acumen was never in question.

“I liked working with Lane,” Saban said during his weekly radio show Thursday night. “Lane is a great play caller and you know really, really great imagination. Really good on game day in terms of [he] could see what the other team is doing and how they were playing plays and immediately knew how to try to take advantage of it."

As for what's in store this week, those with first-hand experience of Kiffin wouldn't be surprised at all if he had something special cooked up for his former team.

“Coach Kiffin’s an offensive mastermind,” former Alabama walk-on receiver Mac Hereford said. “It’s like he had this bag of tricks. He only pulls so many out at a time, but he has like 300 sitting there ready to use.

“It’s why I’m scared every time Alabama plays him. They see a lot on film, but I don’t think you can ever fully prepare for that Kiffin offense. No one truly knows all the tricks he has up his sleeves.”