Lane Kiffin on LSU-Bama, Tennessee, how USC would have fared in the SEC and more

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SN: How many teams out there right now are better than USC?

KIFFIN: You know, I don't watch enough because we're playing on Saturdays. That's for the writers to figure out.

SN: The writers had eight teams ahead of you after your season ended.

KIFFIN: I watched a little bit of that great game--LSU vs. Alabama. You'd like to play against one of those great teams and see what happens. We finally got our defense fixed, after a year and a half, even though we started three freshman linebackers the last four games of the year; if you can play great defense and have a franchise quarterback and have two great receivers, you can play with anybody on a given day. It would've been great to see.

SN: Was this season your best coaching job?

KIFFIN: I don't know that. If you look at the last three years, they've been very different, with a lot of obstacles. Go back three years ago and you come into Tennessee to replace a Hall of Fame coach who's been there forever and won a national championship; you're not from the South; (LSU) and Florida are coming off three straight national championships between them and that's who you're recruiting against.

SN: A plan to make as much noise as possible? To piss people off?

KIFFIN: I interviewed with four A.D.s when I got released at Oakland--at Syracuse, Washington, Tennessee and Clemson--and I had some time there after getting let go at Oakland where I could really focus on exact plans and lay them out. I wrote them out exactly what I needed to do as head coach, from recruiting as a staff, having studied the rosters, everything--four different plans. As that Tennessee plan was put into place, I felt that was a unique place at that time; they'd come off a 5-7 season and there wasn't a lot of national juice around the program. ... Tennessee wasn't that same brand name it had been just a few years before, and so I felt we had to get national attention because of that and because of Nick Saban, Les Miles and Urban Meyer; they were the best in the world on the field and off the field, and there was a huge recruiting gap. So saying the thing about winning in the Swamp and going head to head with those guys and going after their commitments, that was to fire up our fan base, make sure our fan base and our players believed. The two years before we got there, Florida and Alabama had just crushed Tennessee, so there was no confidence in those players.

SN: You've been called much worse than polarizing. Davis called you a liar. In Knoxville, you were called selfish, disloyal and dishonest. How does it make you feel to be disreputable?

KIFFIN: Let me make sure I say this statement right: I don't care what people who don't know me think about me. ... As far as Mr. Davis, I did not manage that relationship well. I was very young, and my mistake was that I went in there knowing from guys who'd been there in the past that one of two things was going to happen. You could sit there and be a "yes, sir" guy to everything he wanted, get along really well and be a pawn--and you're never going to win because you're going to get stuck with some player drafted out of nowhere two rounds ahead of where he's supposed to and free agents who can't play anymore because he's going to make decisions that are different from everybody else in the league who has caught up and has a system of how to do things. He would remember things a player did five years before and think he's still the same player. Well, he's 40 now. Or you could go the other way and go in and fight for what you believe in when you want to draft Calvin Johnson instead of JaMarcus Russell--fight for it knowing it's his decision, but fight for the things you want along the way. But it caused a lot of conflict and obviously didn't work.

And the Tennessee part of it, you say disloyal, but go back to the people I worked for. Mike Hamilton, the (former) A.D. there, still texts me. He knows I didn't do anything wrong; he knew what I felt about (USC). He knew if this would ever happen--and none of us thought Pete would just up and leave--that this was the one place I'd have to look at. The kids being born in California, the wife loving Manhattan Beach, all of her friends here over six years and all the memories of here--it was impossible to turn down. For the rest of my life, I would've watched SC football and said, "I had a chance to do that, had a chance at my dream job, and I said no."

SN: Looking back, was there anything you could have done to help avoid or mitigate an eventual scandal involving Reggie Bush?

KIFFIN: No, I didn't see anything at all that would even make me think anything like that. I wasn't his position coach, but obviously I was on staff here. There was nothing I ever saw that would make us even think anything of that. It was so far away from here. It's a unique infraction, if you look at it. The majority of these things that happen where these big penalties come over years are because of things that helped a program win football games, and I think that's why this was so hard for this university and our fans to accept. It was Reggie Bush's family supposedly taking money after he was already at USC, from people that have nothing to do with USC, had nothing to do with the performance here on the field in any of those championships or wins. Usually, it's from a booster paying a kid to get him to come to their school so they're enhancing their program, or a coach having knowledge of that. None of this was like that at all. Why is Matt Barkley sitting at home instead of playing in a championship game and a bowl game because of something (more than) five years ago?

SN: What could you have accomplished at Tennessee?

KIFFIN: I think we were going to do great things. I know we were; I know we were on the right path. We had completely changed the recruiting trail, completely changed what had been going on if you look at the wars of LSU, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee--we had become very relevant in that. We had signed a great quaterback in Tyler Bray, the perfect system fit--big, strong arm, just like the guys we've had here over the years. It was really coming together, and I just really saw it happening.

One of our interns had been there and was at Tennessee after I left. I said, "I can't believe you ever came here after sitting at Tennessee and hearing all the things about me." He said, "Coach, it's not as bad as you think. They burned all that stuff and they rioted because they really liked you. If they didn't like you and didn't like what was going on, they wouldn't have cared." People were excited, as you could see by their reaction. I took their reaction in a positive way.

SN: Does an LSU-Alabama rematch for the BCS title make sense to you?

KIFFIN: If that's what the writers say and that's what the system is, then I guess that's what it should be. With close games like that last one of theirs, a million things can make it different. A ref throwing a flag, the wind moving a kick, a player's foot being 2 inches out of bounds--it doesn't necessarily mean my team's better than yours or vice versa. If you played that game 10 times, who knows if it's 5-5 or 10-0?

SN: Could this USC team have been a 10-game winner playing in the SEC?

KIFFIN: Yeah, I think so. Definitely. The SEC's a great conference; great front sevens--that's where your difference is. This is the land of the quarterback. So there's arguments on both sides. This conference has become much more competitive than it was years ago when we were here the last time. It's more balanced. If you would look at all-conference teams back then or NFL selections, it was just SC and then take the other nine teams combined.

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