Conference USA Football

This play resulted in a loss of almost 90 yards.

HOW IS THIS EVEN REAL? pic.twitter.com/gsD9GulNaF

— CBS Sports (@CBSSports) September 10, 2017

After allowing three unanswered touchdowns to Mississippi State, Louisiana Tech looked poised to open the fourth quarter with a touchdown.

Although already facing a 57-14 deficit, the Bulldogs had a 2nd-and-goal at the six-yard line to slightly lessen the rout.

They somehow played the next down from their own seven.

An errant snap soared over quarterback J'Mar Smith's head, and an outlandish comedy of errors followed. In a sequence that can only be soundtracked by "Yakety Sax," multiple players from both sides bobbled and kicked the ball all the way to the opposite end of the field.

Louisiana Tech wide receiver Cee Jay Powell at least avoided a disastrous turnover by recovering the loose ball. The absurd sequence cost them 87 yards, and they only managed a 21-yard run on their 3rd-and-93.

[CBS Sports]

The Florida Atlantic football team will avoid Hurricane Irma by staying in Wisconsin following the team's 31-14 loss to the Badgers Saturday.

According to Myron Medcalf of ESPN, "Wisconsin officials have offered Florida Atlantic the use of its training facilities, lodging and other resources" to help FAU remain in Madison indefinitely.

Florida governor Rick Scott has ordered mass evacuations throughout much of the state in preparation for the hurricane.

Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Brock Long expects millions to be without power for several days or weeks, per Rene Marsh of CNN.

Several Florida schools canceled or postponed their football games for the weekend, including Florida and Florida State. Miami and South Florida were both scheduled to play on the road but canceled their games due to concerns about the ability to return home.

However, the Owls traveled to Wisconsin with 23 family members before ultimately deciding to remain in town for as long as necessary.

"I give [athletic director Barry Alvarez] credit," FAU athletic director Pat Chun said. "Him and his staff made it very clear to us they would make any and all accommodations necessary to ensure that if the stay was elongated, they would assist us in any way possible."

Florida Atlantic is scheduled to host Bethune-Cookman next Saturday, although it remains to be seen whether that game will go on as scheduled.

FIRST STEPS on Legion Field! Tim Alexander promised he would WALK out when @UAB_FB returned #theReturn #GreaterBHAM #GoBlazers pic.twitter.com/b89GsL3lBQ

— UAB (@UABNews) September 2, 2017

Timothy Alexander made UAB's first football game since 2014 worth the wait by walking the game ball to midfield.

Now serving as the team's director of character development, the former high school player was paralyzed 11 years ago in a car accident. According to ABC 33/40's Edward Burch, he was given a 5 percent chance of walking again.

Last year, he stepped out of his wheelchair for the first time. Per Burch, he expressed the desire to step on the field during the Blazers' return.

"My goal is to lead the team out of the tunnel in 2017," Alexander said. "I'm not coming out of the tunnel in a wheelchair, I know that."

With some help, he walked the game ball to the official before Saturday's bout against Alabama A&M. UAB followed the inspirational moment with a 38-7 victory.

[UAB]

Rice University's football team has temporarily relocated to TCU's campus due to ongoing flooding and damage caused by Tropical Storm Harvey.

"I want to thank the staffs at TCU, SMU, Baylor and UTEP who all reached out to offer whatever help we needed," Rice coach David Bailiff stated, per Sam Khan Jr. of ESPN.com. "There is a strong brotherhood in the coaching world, and it is never more evident than at times like these. While we would love to be coming home today, our first responsibility is the safety of these players. We learned some lessons in 2008 [when the Owls were at Vanderbilt when Hurricane Ike struck Houston] about coming home too soon."

Rice spent the weekend in Australia, playing Stanford in the Sydney Cup. The team was unable to fly into Houston because of the flooding caused by the storm, which has left most of the city under a siege of water. Recovery efforts are ongoing throughout coastal Texas.

Rice athletic director Joe Karlgaard said he does not know when the team can return to campus.

"That's a good question. Even if the campus is fine, we're not sure about the main arteries into Houston," Karlgaard said, per Dennis Dodd and Tom Fornelli of CBS Sports.

Rice does not play again until Sept. 9 against UTEP. Its first home game is not until Sept. 23 against Florida Atlantic. 

He is 32A now, and there's no getting around it. His days of flying first class—of no expense spared and no excuses made or given—are way back there, sir.

"Seat 32A," Lane Kiffin says. "How about that?"           

The obvious question: What was it like?

"About what you'd think."

A few rungs down from what he's used to.

The new head coach of Florida Atlantic University is having to get used to it, though.

Kiffin recounted the cramped coach-class flight at Conference USA media day in Dallas in front of a media scrum of, oh, say, eight reporters. If his seat on the flight was a long, lonely walk from first class, so too is coaching tiny FAU from being the youngest head coach in modern NFL history with the then-Oakland Raiders, from head coaching college blue bloods Tennessee and USC, from being Nick Saban's right-hand man at Alabama.

The past decade has been a frenzied, convoluted ride—an unthinkable and improbable career line of unimaginable highs and self-destructive lows—for Kiffin. A coaching life equal parts charmed and jaded pushing him further and further to the back of the line and into reality's cold embrace.

Long story short: fired, left for another job, fired, fired. And now here he is, coaching the last FBS school that would have him as head coach.

"If I don't make it here," Kiffin says, "I guess I'm just a play-caller."

He knows this is it. His last chance as a head coach.

He can't afford to screw it up this time.

---

"Lane is a very smart coach. He knows the game," Alabama head coach Nick Saban says and then hesitates, and you just know there's a "but" floating in the thought.

Because there's always a qualifier following the idea, the concept, of Lane Kiffin, head coach. Has been for the last decade, and even Kiffin admits, "more than likely" will be for a long time.

"But," Saban continues, choosing his words carefully, "what Lane will figure out, what every coach eventually figures out, is it's about people."

It is here where we introduce the very crux of the Failure of Kiffin: He doesn't work well with others. At least, others in the coaching profession vital to his existence.

---

To keep up with the latest on Lane Kiffin—and every NCAA coach—download the new B/R app.

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There is no argument Kiffin can coach. He's one of the best developers of quarterback talent and play-callers in college football. That's backed by tangible statistics, records and championships.

Then there are the intangibles, the nagging problems that have prevented a brilliant offensive mind from becoming a successful head coach.

The criticisms from coaches and staff members who have worked with him are all the same. Selfish. Short-tempered. Egotistical.

"By the end of our time together, I wanted to physically beat his ass," says one former coach who worked with Kiffin. "And I wasn't the only one."

But those are the same people who use words like "genius" and "guru" and "gifted" when speaking of his coaching ability.

Like any job in any walk of life, success is a complete package. It's easy to celebrate the good, yet impossible to avoid the bad. The undeniable truth for Kiffin: His bad always overshadows the good.

Weeks after he was hired at FAU, he completed putting together a staff that included offensive coordinator Kendal Briles (a former member of the staff at Baylor which a Pepper Hamilton report said made choices that "posed a risk to campus safety and the integrity of the University") and former Ole Miss defensive line coach Chris Kiffin (a key figure in the NCAA's investigation of Ole Miss). Kiffin says the FAU administration has fully vetted both, but the hirings clearly call into question early decision-making in his last chance gig.

Everyone, you see, has a blind spot. Not everyone's is as big as the Atlantic Ocean that sits but a few miles from the FAU campus.

---

Will I survive? Will I die? Come on, let's picture the possibility.

Kiffin and his team stroll into the crisp Boca Raton sun for the first day of fall camp with 2Pac's All Eyez on Me blaring over the loudspeakers.

Everyone is watching, everyone is waiting, for the next Lane-being-Lane moment. For the circus to arrive.

You better believe Kiffin knows it.

"There's so much out there, and half of what you read or hear isn't true," Kiffin says.

"And the other half?" he is asked.

"I don't think there's a person out there who can say they haven't done something they regret," Kiffin says.

There is no truer valuation of a coach than what his colleagues think of him. The coaching fraternity is a brutal and cutthroat business. There is animosity and jealousy, but the fraternity rarely, if ever, publicly speaks poorly of each other.

Then Kiffin enters the conversation, and the entire dynamic immediately changes. They won't speak publicly about Kiffin and his flaws because no president or administrator at any university will hire a coach who airs dirty laundry. But they'll dish anonymously.

"I've never seen a guy who knows his craft like he does be such an overbearing assh--e," says one coach who worked with Kiffin. "Lane does what Lane wants to do, no matter the consequences."

Says another coach on one of Kiffin's staffs: "He's completely unaware of his impact on others. When you're a coach, everything you say and do is not only scrutinized by the media and your boosters, but modeled by your players. Eventually, that will eat away at what you're trying to build until there is nothing left."

There's a reason he went from being Al Davis' hand-picked gut feeling to lead the Raiders, to Davis calling him a "flat-out liar." A reason he had to be escorted out of the Tennessee football facility the back way and leave campus on the back roads when he hastily announced he was leaving after one season to accept his "dream job" at USC. A reason USC athletic director Pat Haden pulled him off the team bus at LAX at 4 a.m. after a brutal loss, fired him on the spot—and still won't talk about him to this day.

A reason Kiffin didn't speak with any other assistant coach at Alabama—outside of game preparation—for a majority of the 2016 season.

A reason he was fortunate to have made it as far as he did in Tuscaloosa.

---

Saban had finally had enough of Kiffin.

At one point during Kiffin's last week in Tuscaloosa, an Alabama staffer says he was answering his phone on the field during practice, trying to assemble a staff and recruit for FAU while his current team was preparing for the College Football Playoff. He was showing up late to team meetings and missed the team bus after the CFP semifinal media day—at which he had told reporters he didn't recall a time when Saban was happy with his play-calling; he only recalled "the ass chewings."

So Saban—with yet another national title within his grasp and the unofficial title of greatest college coach ever dangling in the moment—made an at-the-time seemingly unfathomable decision.

A source close to the situation says Saban told Kiffin after the semifinal, a win over Washington, that they would publicly agree serving two masters (Alabama and FAU) wasn't going to work and Kiffin would leave before the biggest game of the season—the national championship rematch against Clemson—to focus solely on his new job.

In other words, We won't say you're fired, and you can save face and move on. But of course Kiffin couldn't let it end like that.

He went on national radio, on Mike & Mike, and said, "This was a decision that I came up with, and was very difficult to do. This was not something that Nick Saban forced me to do by any means. If I wanted to coach [the] game, I would've coached [the] game."

Makes Saban's decision a bit more fathomable in retrospect.

"Nick was sick of all that nonsense, and that wasn't the half of it," says a former Alabama staffer. "It had been building for a while.

"The last thing Nick wants is for something like that to infiltrate his process. He won't let that happen. One way or the other, Lane wasn't coaching at Alabama after last season. Nick just cut it one game short."

---

So why, you ask, would the game's best coach—the man who puts his process and the team above all else—put up with Kiffin's "nonsense" for three years in the first place? Why does anyone?

Here's why:

• Blake Sims was a fifth-year senior quarterback who never took a significant snap at Alabama—who played wide receiver the year before Kiffin arrived after being fired at USC—and by the time Kiffin was done with him, he set team passing records, won an SEC championship, was named MVP of the SEC Championship Game and led the Tide to the CFP. In one season. "He finds your strengths," Sims says, "and maximizes them."

• Jake Coker was a transfer quarterback from Florida State, where he couldn't win a starting job, who arrived at Alabama and couldn't beat out a guy who was transitioning to quarterback from receiver. A year later, he stepped in and played big in every critical moment of a national championship season. In two CFP games, he completed 75 percent of his passes for 621 yards, four touchdowns and no interceptions. "He loves the big stage, he loves to get you ready for it. He lives for that stuff," Coker says. "You're at timeout, you go to the sideline and look for the play call, and he says, 'This is a touchdown.' And then, yep, it's a touchdown."

• Jalen Hurts was the SEC Offensive Player of the Year in his first year under Kiffin and was one play away from leading Alabama to another national championship.

Three first-year starters, three SEC championships, three College Football Playoff appearances. Three quarterbacks who will likely never play the position at the next level.

Need more proof? Jonathan Crompton was a career backup at Tennessee when Kiffin arrived. He played so well in his only season as a starter, he was drafted by the San Diego Chargers. Indeed, despite all of Kiffin's off-field issues in Knoxville (12 NCAA secondary violations in 14 months), the ill will he left behind had little to do with the product on the field.

"He did a helluva job. Probably still his best coaching job," says one of Kiffin's assistants at Tennessee. "But he played fast and loose—there's no doubt about that. Would something have come up eventually that could've ended it all? Probably."

Even at USC, where Kiffin had elite talent, quarterback Matt Barkley set single-season passing records—all while the program was dealing with debilitating NCAA sanctions that included the loss of 30 scholarships.

The only time Kiffin didn't work his quarterback/offense magic was his 20-game stint with the Raiders. But there's a backstory, one that Kiffin says soiled the relationship early and never allowed the team to develop.

Davis, the team's legendary general managing partner, wanted to draft LSU's JaMarcus Russell with the first pick of the 2007 NFL draft. Kiffin wanted no part of it. Davis made the pick anyway, and after that, it was only a matter of time before it all unraveled. Russell held out until the second week of September, didn't play until the last month of the season and was a bust.

You might be able to win big in college football with Blake Sims, but it's not happening in the NFL with the equivalent (Josh McCown, Daunte Culpepper at the end of his career).

"He and Al had a very strong difference of opinion as it pertained to player personnel issues," says Amy Trask, the Raiders' CEO under Davis. "Many were critical of Al for cycling through as many coaches as he did as his life drew to an end. Maybe he didn't give him enough time. But I don't know that any of us, when we're approaching 80 and in ill health, would have the patience we had at 40 or 50.

"I do believe [Kiffin] can succeed in the right environment."

---

I can take good news, I can take bad news. I can't take surprises.

This was one of the ground rules Saban laid out for Kiffin when he first saved him from exile in 2014. "It didn't take long to figure out what he meant," Kiffin says.

The thought process Saban approaches coaching with is so very Saban. If a scenario comes up during a game where a decision has to be made, the staff has already talked about it.

Saban's Saturday morning game-day routine is legendary, a snapshot of all things obsessive and controlling. And of winning. Every possible scenario of what will and could happen is meticulously played out, right down to pulling out a print of the opposing team's stadium, identifying the loudest end zone and deciding where you'll take the ball if the game goes to overtime. The starting 22 is broken down by player and potential scenarios in case of injury or specific substitutions—and analyzed three teams deep. That's a detailed plan for 66 players.

"When I first experienced that, I thought, We won 34 straight at USC [when he was an assistant to Pete Carroll] and we didn't have meetings like this," Kiffin says. "Then I thought, He's talking everything through to hear people's thoughts and explain what he's thinking and to cover every single thing so he doesn't have any surprises."

Kiffin knew that if he were to ever get another head coaching job, this was what he had to emulate.

It was the one way to make sure he wouldn't screw it up again.

How devoted is he to Saban's process? Not long after Kiffin was hired at FAU, he gave up the one thing that sets him apart from just about every other coach: developing quarterbacks and calling plays. He hired Briles to run the show at FAU, and he promises he won't interfere.

"It's hard not being part of it. Boring, really," Kiffin says. "But it has also allowed me to visit in the defense meetings and the special teams meetings and get a better grasp on the team as a whole."

This is in direct contrast to Kiffin's last job as a head coach, where the job of play-caller was too often placed ahead of running the team. It hit rock bottom for Kiffin at USC in the final game of 2012, a season the Trojans began ranked No. 1 in the nation despite still having a depleted roster due to NCAA sanctions from the Pete Carroll era.

USC was playing Georgia Tech in a meaningless bowl game in El Paso, Texas. It was brutally cold, and Tech was doing what it does to any team that hasn't experienced the triple-option: pounding them mercifully. Kiffin spent the entire second half of the game wrapped in a big white parka, with a hood over his head and his face buried in his call sheet, trying to save a game with the right play and oblivious to what was happening all around him. After the ugly 21-7 loss, a fight broke out in the locker room, frustrations from a lost season of hope spilling out.

Five games into the following season, Kiffin was fired.

"I think back to USC at times, where I'm the head coach, and I've got to go over and talk to the quarterback and wide receiver about something in the middle of the game because we have to score points," Kiffin says. "And then all of a sudden, I hear on the headset, 'Hey, Coach, you gotta make a decision on this penalty, to take it or not.' And I'm not into what's going on—only what we needed at that point from the offense.

"That won't happen anymore."

Not everyone is buying it.

"I'll believe that when I see it," says one former Kiffin assistant. "If he can do all of that, and he can focus on big picture and not his play sheet, he might have a chance.

"Some guys are really good at doing multiple things. [FSU coach] Jimbo [Fisher] is really good at calling a game on offense and managing the game as the head coach. Lane is not a guy that can do both."

---

There's a half-moon circular drive that runs through the campus at FAU, flowing right past the best stadium in Conference USA and dumping back out on Glades Road and a short skip to Interstate 95.

One way in, one way out.

"Kind of fitting, right?" Kiffin says with a laugh.

There's only one way out of this mess he has made over the last decade, one way of proving himself and finding somewhere from nowhere.

"People's perception changes so fast," Kiffin says. "You win, and people say, 'Well, he had all of those sanctions at USC, and that's why he lost.' You lose, and, 'OK, he's a bad head coach, and he's just a good play-caller wherever he has been.'

"This is a defining job, one way or the other."

It's about what you'd think it is. You can see first class from FAU, but just barely.

He can't screw it up this time.

Florida Atlantic head coach Lane Kiffin denied on Wednesday that former Baylor head coach Art Briles is serving as a consultant for the Owls.

"Somebody texted me and wanted to know why I hired Art Briles, and I was like, 'What?'" Kiffin said, per Chris Low of ESPN.com. "He's absolutely not a consultant and has never been to practice or spoken to our team. That's classic 'somebody trying to make it a story' because it's Art Briles and Lane Kiffin."

Kiffin's remarks follow comments from both offensive coordinator Kendal Briles—the son of Art Briles—and the head coach himself that suggested the former Baylor coach may be serving as an informal consultant for the program.

"Obviously, he has ideas," Kendal Briles told Matthew DeFranks of the Sun-Sentinel on Monday. "He wants to know personnel and different guys and making sure we're getting those guys in the right spots and getting them touches and all that stuff. He's a football coach, that's all he's ever been. He's definitely involved and we talk daily."

"Obviously, he's done unbelievable things on offense," Kiffin added Monday. "It's his system that he started years and years ago. Every once in a while, I'll text or call him and bounce something off of him."

But Kiffin emphasized on Wednesday that his communication with Art Briles was mostly to give him updates on how his son was handling his offensive coordinator duties.

"He's a coach's dad just like mine, and I told him that his son is doing a really good job, which all dads, especially coach's dads, love to hear," he said, per Low. "It's no different than when you call a player's parent and tell them their son is doing well. And in the course of that, I've asked him a few questions because it's obviously his [offensive] system that he's run for years. So I've asked him a couple of questions about alignments of players or something like that."

Kiffin, 42, is in his first year as the head coach of Florida Atlantic after a career that included failed head-coaching stints with the Oakland Raiders (2007-08), Tennessee Volunteers (2009) and USC Trojans (2010-13). He took the FAU job after serving as the offensive coordinator under Nick Saban for Alabama (2014-16).

After his previous unsuccessful head-coaching tenures, Kiffin likely isn't courting controversy this time around. And having Art Briles as a hired consultant would be extremely controversial after he was fired from Baylor in 2016 following a university-sanctioned investigation that found he failed to properly handle and oversee a number of domestic violence and sexual assault cases during his tenure at the school. 

Florida Atlantic Owls head football coach Lane Kiffin and offensive coordinator Kendal Briles said Sunday that they are both in communication with former Baylor head coach Art Briles regarding offensive principles.

According to Matthew DeFranks of the South Florida Sun Sentinel, Kiffin and Briles said they have reached out informally to the elder Briles because of his knowledge and experience running the uptempo offense they are employing at FAU.

Kendal, who is Art Briles' son, said the following about his discussions with his father: "Obviously, he has ideas. He wants to know personnel and different guys and making sure we're getting those guys in the right spots and getting them touches and all that stuff. He's a football coach—that's all he's ever been. He's definitely involved, and we talk daily."

From 2008 through 2015, Kendal served under Art as an assistant at Baylor. Kendal was the offensive coordinator during his father's final season with the Bears in 2015, and he remained in that role during the 2016 campaign.

Baylor fired the elder Briles in May 2016 amid a sexual assault scandal involving Baylor football players. It also resulted in the resignation of Baylor president Ken Starr and athletic director Ian McCaw.

Kendal Briles and Kiffin made it clear that Art isn't a member of the coaching staff, but Kiffin mentioned the relationship he has with the former Bears head coach: "Obviously, he's done unbelievable things on offense. It's his system that he started years and years ago. Every once in a while, I'll text or call him and bounce something off of him."

During Briles' time as Baylor's head coach, the Bears went 65-37 and reached bowl games in six of his eight seasons.

Baylor was annually near the top of the nation offensively under Briles, and it led college football in points per game every year from 2013 through 2015.

Former Oklahoma quarterback Chris Robison announced his intention to transfer to Florida Atlantic for the fall semester.

Eddie Radosevich of Sooner Scoop provided the statement:

Former #Sooners QB Chris Robison announces via Twitter he will join the Florida Atlantic football program. pic.twitter.com/RIgrmKgkyL

— Eddie Radosevich (@Eddie_Rado) August 15, 2017

Florida Atlantic head football coach Lane Kiffin responded to social media buzz Friday comparing his 2013 exit from USC to Friday's announcement by President Donald Trump that General John F. Kelly would replace Reince Priebus as the White House Chief of Staff. 

Kiffin tweeted a link to a Fansided article comparing the two firings, adding the hashtag "#Feel4U":

Donald Trump firing his Chief of Staff draws Lane Kiffin, USC comparisons. #Feel4U https://t.co/yJHSoZfAfF

— Lane Kiffin (@Lane_Kiffin) July 28, 2017

The former Trojans head coach was fired at the airport when the team arrived back from a 62-41 loss at Arizona State four years ago. Billy Witz of the New York Times noted he was called off the team bus before the return trip to campus around 3 a.m. local time and informed of the program's decision.

In January 2016, Kiffin called that moment the "lowest point" of his career and said he was completely unaware of the impending termination, per Dennis Dodd of CBS Sports.

"I had no idea at all," he said. "It totally caught me off guard. I got off the plane. I put my bag on the bus. I was going to sleep at the facility. Someone came and said, 'Pat wants to see you.' I left my briefcase on the bus."

Fast forward to Friday, when Politico's Josh Gerstein (via Kenneth Vogel of the New York Times) reported the vehicle Priebus was in got left on the Joint Base Andrews tarmac after the president's motorcade left:

How it ends: @Reince left alone in a suburban on Andrew @usairforce base tarmac as rest of motorcade departs, per @joshgerstein pool report. pic.twitter.com/pFMK5PEZ8K

— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) July 28, 2017

After his bizarre final moments as USC's head coach, Kiffin went on to spend three years on Alabama's offensive coordinator before accepting the FAU job in December.

First-year Florida Atlantic head coach Lane Kiffin hosted a satellite camp on campus Monday and had some fun with reporters in the process.

"We aspire to be like Jim Harbaugh," the coach said of the Michigan coach who famously undertook a busy satellite camp schedule in the past, via Rachel Lenzi of Land of 10. "No, seriously, he does a great job. He gets everywhere, and they [Michigan] have the resources to do that."

ESPN.com shared a video clip of some of Kiffin's comments:

Lenzi noted coaches from Michigan, Tennessee, Oregon, Auburn and Arkansas were all at the camp, and Kiffin said members of the Wolverines' coaching staff reached out to Florida Atlantic's staff about attending.

The NCAA previously restricted Division I programs to a mere 10 June days of satellite camps, and Michigan coaches have attended camps in Ohio, Florida, Maryland and Georgia thus far this year, per Lenzi.

There is a satellite-camp connection between Kiffin and Harbaugh. Alabama head coach Nick Saban criticized the practice when Kiffin was the Crimson Tide's offensive coordinator, prompting this response from Harbaugh:

"Amazing" to me- Alabama broke NCAA rules & now their HC is lecturing us on the possibility of rules being broken at camps. Truly "amazing."

— Coach Harbaugh (@CoachJim4UM) June 1, 2016

Kiffin was surely harkening back to the exchange between the two schools when he joked Monday, but aspiring to be like Harbaugh isn't a bad plan. Michigan went 10-3 in each of the last two years under the coach and was in the thick of the College Football Playoff race for most of the 2016 campaign.

Florida Atlantic is coming off three straight 3-9 campaigns, meaning Kiffin is facing a daunting challenge.