Is This The Year Lane Kiffin Gets Another Head Coaching Job?

Hiring retread football coaches is generally a bad idea. The occasional Pete Carroll miracle notwithstanding, they rarely progress beyond the tactics that got them canned in the first place, either because they're too ill-equipped to make significant adjustments or too timid to attempt them. They're football coaches, and also humans. Change is not easy or comfortable for either group.

Yet, this being football, these coaches tend to find work, because the least progressive sport in the America defaults to flawed experience far more often than untried potential. This is how middle managers like Norv Turner and Wade Phillips have been over-promoted to six combined NFL head coaching gigs. It explains Tommy Tuberville endlessly touring the coaching circuit and Charlie Weis somehow burping his way into a second college head coach tenure. It's why the likes of Dennis Franchione and Larry Coker and, until recently, Norm Chow are still hanging on by their fingernails.

And it's why we're pondering every fan's favorite inevitability: is this year Lane Kiffin gets another head coaching gig?

This isn't to argue he deserves one. Kiffin was awful in Oakland and loudmouthed in Knoxville and eagerly paddled into impending NCAA disaster in Los Angeles; he rarely achieved much on-field success at any of his stops. Having covered him at USC, I'd submit he's far more insecure than he is an asshole, but he doesn't do himself any favors by smirking his way through every public exchange or skirmishing with the media, either. He recruits with the very best, but often sandbags those superior athletes with overly conservative schemes. Worse coaches than him are gainfully employed, but none of them are quite so adept at creating headaches as he is, either. The upside shouldn't outweigh the risk of hiring him again.

Still, there are already 13 coaching vacancies in play, with more soon to come. That number could even double between outright firings, like the inexplicable one about to dumped on Les Miles, and cross-school jumps, such as the increasingly plausible Charlie Strong relocation from Texas to Miami.

Someone needs to fill these positions, and Kiffin can sell a better story than most. Bend your ear just right, and you can hear him parry each failure. It's not his fault that he answered to Al Davis when the latter was mentally and physically disintegrating by the hour, or that Davis foisted JaMarcus Russell upon Kiffin despite the coach's vehement objections. The 2009 season with Tennessee wasn't that bad, you know; this will the first year since that the team may post a better record than Kiffin's 7-6 mark, and he put up that record while coaching Jonathan Crompton, a man who played quarterback like he'd been lobotomized. Sure, things got messy at USC, but the Trojans were legitimately terrifying in 2011 and he hauled them to a preseason number-one ranking while in the throes of NCAA sanctions. Oh, and those play-calling issues? Asked and answered in Tuscaloosa, where he's quietly done great work and is gunning for his third national championship as an offensive assistant. He's still just 40, after all—less than a month older than Tom Herman, college football's resident Doogie Howser. Who's to say that a man so young can't learn from his failures?

This is mostly horseshit, of course, but it will play to a certain kind of administrator. Such upside-minded marks may even be enticed by Kiffin's penchant for causing a scene—which, in the right kind of overlooked backwater, can be spun as invigorating rather than merely embarrassing.

It's hardly certain that this is the year Kiffin gets another shot. To wit, FOX Sports' Bruce Feldman released a 51-man list of intriguing coaching candidates, and Kiffin was nowhere to be found on it. Yet so much of it is composed of coordinators, and the enduring lesson of last year's coaching merry-go-round was how wary Power 5 schools have become of hiring assistants without head coaching experience. Pat Narduzzi got the Pitt job while Derek Mason landed Vanderbilt, but Herman wound up in Houston after coordinating a national championship-winning offense at OSU, while former Clemson OC Chad Morris took the SMU gig. Bryan Harsin went from Texas to Boise State. Kiffin's successfully coordinated better programs than any of them—probably more than anyone else in the game—and supplements it with a half-dozen years of head coaching experience to boot.

So it stands to reason that, eventually, he'll land somewhere after the proven head coaches are accounted for, whether it's this year or next or sometime soon after that. Kiffin will probably fail again, too, not necessarily because he is who he is—well, at least not entirely that—but because this Pete Carroll protégé is far more like the legion of coaches who get one shot too many than his mentor who transcended them.

But that is years down the line, and that clock will start after Kiffin gets the nod in the first place, and before initial excitement begins once again give way to regret. Someone will call him, hoping to be convinced that this time will be different. He's silver-tongued when he needs to be, and Lane Kiffin will know how to tell precisely them what they want to hear, once they get around to asking.