Lane Kiffin on if Alabama would have won title game if he stayed: 'I don't know that'
If you’re an Alabama fan wondering if the outcome of the College Football Playoff National Championship Game would have been different if Lane Kiffin was still the Tide’s offensive coordinator, he has no idea either.
Kiffin did a lengthy interview with Fox Sports Radio’s “Outkick the Coverage” on Thursday and was asked if he thought the game would have gone differently had he been on the sideline.
“I don’t know that,” Kiffin said. “There’s no way to know that. [Then-offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian] was put in a very difficult situation. Whatever it was, a week, eight days or whatever and all the sudden you’re calling the game. So like you said, it’s the hardest one to try to figure out. You’re talking about one play. So one different play here. If it would have been different and had I been there that meant I would have won — if that is the case I don’t know that. It wouldn’t have been to do with anything about Sark. It would have been the players being comfortable of what they know.”
Kiffin, who had been hired as the head coach at Florida Atlantic, balanced both duties in Alabama’s CFP semifinal win over Washington in the Peach Bowl. He told Fox Sports that discussions about him moving on fully to FAU before the end of Alabama’s season began not long after the semifinal.
“The next day we came back from the Washington game we were in the office and started going over some discussions, myself and him, and kind of tabled it for the night and came back for the next day and we came to the — we were going to avoid the distractions of trying to do both jobs and he was going to go on the way he wanted to,” Kiffin said.
You can listen to the lengthy interview in full. The former USC head coach also said that he “definitely would have made a lot more money” as LSU’s offensive coordinator in 2017 than he is as FAU’s head coach.
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of Dr. Saturday and From the Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
