By Steve Greenberg, Sporting News

Outside of the recruiting sanctions and the no bowl games," Lane Kiffin is saying, "everything is great."

Ba-da-bum. Rim shot! Only Kiffin isn't joking. Two days after USC's season-ending 50-0 win vs. UCLA, the Trojans' 36-year-old coach is in his Heritage Hall office mulling a brief family vacation vs. tying up loose ends at work before heading out on the recruiting trail. (He will choose the latter.) And he sounds generally pleased--with his team's 10-2 finish, highlighted by a defining 38-35 victory at Oregon, and with the state of his program, despite the two-year bowl ban that'll be lifted in 2012 and the 30 scholarships that'll be lost over the next three years.

But is Kiffin--the most disliked and disrespected coach in college football--to be believed? It really doesn't matter. And you want to know why? Because Kiffin, after he was blasted in 2008 by late Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis and incited riots in early 2010 upon his departure from Tennessee, has earned the benefit of the doubt. Especially after he performed as well as any coach in America in 2011.

This is a man who bypassed his senior season as a backup quarterback at Fresno State to sit, as a graduate assistant, next to then-offensive coordinator Jeff Tedford in the press box. Who at 24 was under the wing of defensive coordinator Dom Capers with the Jacksonville Jaguars. And who was hired at 25 by Pete Carroll at USC, where he would move up the ladder blindingly fast. So what if he has benefited some by being the son of coaching lifer Monte Kiffin?

"I had great experiences that made me more prepared for jobs than all the people my age," he says. His age is beside the point now. Kiffin's interview with Sporting News:

SN: You're almost all the way through the bowl ban, but not quite. How are you going to feel those first days of January?

KIFFIN: I'll watch some of the bowl games. I don't know what it's going to feel like. I think the hardest part is not that we're 10-2 and in the top 10 but the way we finished. If we would've finished slow, then it's not as hard--but to see how well these guys played over the last half of the season and in that last game, to win 50-0, that'll probably be the hard part, knowing what it would be like. What happened to us the second year last time--Coach Carroll's second season--we made a great run at the end, and Carson Palmer, just like Matt (Barkley), finished great, won the Heisman, went to the Orange Bowl and won it vs. Iowa, and that really jump-started the program.

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. To go in at a time when Nick Saban, Urban Meyer and Les Miles are just rolling--on the field and in recruiting--that was difficult going in there and battling in the recruiting. Then you come here (in 2010) and you're replacing another Hall of Fame coach who's coming off the greatest run maybe in the history of college football for a seven-year span, and then you have the challenges of winning your team over--and then the probation and the sanctions hit.

SN: You've had more chances than anybody by this age to prove yourself as a coach, in different places, under different circumstances. Have you proved how good you are?

KIFFIN: I've never been concerned with what's written out there about what we're doing. I'm always concerned about the people I work for, what they're thinking about the job I'm doing. That has hurt me before, too. When I take a job, I think I have to do everything that we can to put us in the best position to win for that program. At Tennessee, that hurt me as far as some of the things I said and the way that I was. No one in Tennessee disliked that; my employers loved it, the team loved it, the fans loved it. But the confidence of what we were going to do--"beat Florida" and all that energy in recruiting and everything, going after the best players--that hurt me nationally. Now, same thing: I don't worry what's out there, I just know the people here are very excited about what we did this year and what we're doing with a bunch of young kids.

SN: It has been almost five years since you left USC to become the youngest head coach in NFL history. Could you have fathomed then what has happened in your career since?

KIFFIN: No. There's no way. It'd be a movie, you know? Some people, you could take their whole life to make a movie like just my last four years. It's been crazy, but it's why I feel so comfortable now after going through those experiences. The NFL at 31, then you go down to the SEC--the youngest coach here, then the youngest coach there--and then you come here and you're still the youngest coach. There are all these things that go on, but if you don't learn from them, that's the mistake in all of it. I've made a lot of mistakes. I equate it to a starting quarterback: Quarterbacks get better with experience all the time, and everybody writes about that--the rookie year you throw a bunch of interceptions and everything, make mistakes, and then you learn from the mistakes and get more comfortable. To me, that's being a head coach. You can't be a head coach until you're a head coach; you can't really know what it's like. You're going to make mistakes and you're going to get better with experience, from game-day management to roster management to relationships--everything.

SN: Were you ever described as "polarizing" before you took the Raiders job?

KIFFIN: I don't think so. I think if you happen to be a writer who were somehow to follow me, going from the age of 25 coming here to today, I think the majority of what you'd see would be the same outside of one year, which was Tennessee. There was so much focus on that one year and my actions there, but if you look at the 10-year span I think you'd see nine years really of more what you see now. There's some stuff at Oakland, but really that's a one-person relationship with me and Mr. Davis. Outside of that, you didn't see me saying things about other teams or coaches or any of those things. That was just a very unique plan for Tennessee.

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: How would you describe yourself, not as a means of answering your critics but as you look inward?

KIFFIN: Competitive. Tireless. My Thanksgiving was sitting in here at 5:30 and just still watching UCLA film, still trying to find something. Probably from 5 to 5:30 on Thanksgiving I called Matt Barkley, Marqise Lee and Robert Woods on red zone plays to discuss things with them.

SN: What about family time, work-life balance, burnout--this stuff Urban Meyer talked about when he left Florida? Ever concerned you're headed down that same road?

KIFFIN: Yep. But it's all I know. My dad, to this day, he sleeps right there at the hotel during the season, and his house is only 25 minutes away. He leaves here at 2 a.m. and comes back at 5:30. I was just kind of raised this way, not really knowing anything different.

I almost feel like my body doesn't know any different because I hear people talk about it all the time; sometimes we hire coaches from other staffs and they're blown away by what we do, the hours we put into it, and I've just never understood. I've tried to talk to other coaches and understand their schedules, how they do what they do; coaches who go home for dinner or have breakfast with the kids. I've never been able to do it because I always have that fear that someone's outpreparing us; my fear is to hand our kids a plan and the other team's got something better.

The only thing I have going for me is I don't do anything else. When I'm not here, I'm with the kids. I don't play golf, I don't fish--I don't have any hobbies at all. So that's the only thing going for me because then I'd have no balance.

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: Did you ever talk to Al Davis again before his death?

KIFFIN: I did not. Never spoke to or saw him again after the phone conversation when he called me in my office and fired me over the phone.

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.

SN: How dauntingly, how depressingly, are those 30 scholarship losses looming right now?

KIFFIN: It's challenging, but I've said ever since this came down: I don't know what the top is, but I can tell you we're going to maximize the situation we've been put in. We've been doing that since the day the sanctions came down--been maximizing numbers, moving them around, doing roster management--so really it has become more like an NFL job. These numbers are coming, these huge hits, but understand that we went into Eugene and played 42 initial scholarship players in the game--only 42. So we're practicing already how to do this, practicing things like (2011 senior) Ross Cummings, a backup linebacker, and making him our fullback who plays 40 plays a game; like taking T.J. McDonald and putting him on all of our special teams, our potential All-American safety; putting Marqise Lee, who was just named Pac-12 offensive freshman of the year, on defense in special teams. We're already learning how to manage lower numbers.

SN: Do you want Matt Barkley to come back for his senior season? (UPDATE: Barkley announced today he will stay and play for USC next year.)

KIFFIN: I want Matthew to do whatever he wants to do. He's going to be a top 10 pick, he's totally ready to go, he'll be a franchise quarterback forever for whoever drafts him--and they should be dying to draft him because with what they'll see on film and then once they meet him, this is the spokesperson for your franchise. If you draft a quarterback in the top half of the first round, he better have it all or you ain't winning. And Matt has it all.

But it's just a little bit different because of who he is. Matt is not like the majority of kids his age in that money's not that big a deal to him. ... It's going to be a difficult decision for him because he can be potentially the greatest Trojan of all time because of what he's done but also what he's gone through. He signs here, Coach Carroll is 6-1 in seven straight BCS games, we're just removed from three Heisman winners in a four-year span, two of which were quarterbacks. A no-brainer, right? When he was 6 years old, he told his parents he was coming to SC to be a great quarterback. Boom--athletic director, gone. A presidential change. A head coach change. No bowl games. Probably the darkest SC has ever been if you combine those things plus probation, sanctions. But Matt is leading us back out of that. He has earned the right to go to a Pac-12 championship game and a bowl game, but he doesn't get to do that. Well, if he comes back, he can do those things.

SN: If he turns pro, how high should he be drafted?

KIFFIN: As they dig into the film, there are going to be some teams arguing between Andrew Luck and Matt Barkley (for the No. 1 overall pick). Because the film's going to show there are some arguments there.

SN: Do you have any advice for Urban Meyer as he takes over an Ohio State program that's likely to be hit with NCAA penalties?

KIFFIN: I would, but I don't think Urban's going to be calling me for it. I would because I said it when it happened to us--there's no book for this. There's no manual that says how do you deal with transfers and sanctions and no bowl games and stuff. You just kind of learn on the fly, figure out how to maximize the situation. There's some really key things in there that can really help you through it.

SN: Seems like the bridge between you and Meyer is burned. Any regrets for you so far?

KIFFIN: I think like anything, you don't want any negatives. It's funny you say that--I texted my agent today to ask for Urban's cell phone number so I could leave him a congratulations message. I'm growing up.

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