Florence Snyder
Brand-in-himself (and biggest celebrity football coach in our state) Lane Kiffin has hit the headline-grabbing ground running.
Just weeks on the job at Florida Atlantic University (FAU), Kiffin is providing elite sportswriters and citizen journalists with reams of revealing insights into the mind of the young genius chosen to channel FAU’s “unbridled ambition” into a winning season at the jock palace formerly known as GEO Group Stadium.
The ink was barely dry on Kiffin’s $950,000 contract when he struck a blow for transparency and accountability (T&A), inviting Pete Thamel of Sports Illustrated to keep him company as he shopped around Boca Raton’s $5 million-and-under waterfront properties.
That would be a lot of house for a guy who’s newly divorced from his wife of 16 years, but Kiffin sees it as an “investment in recruiting.”
Best not to think too hard about what that might mean. Among the coaching talent Kiffin attracted to FAU is Baylor’s Kendal Briles; the school has long been up to its eyeballs in litigation for fostering “an environment that promotes sexual assault and a “show ’em a good time” policy.
Baylor is known for sparing no expense in covering up for miscreant players and coaches, but Kiffin, by contrast, is right up front with his misogyny.
Kiffin pulled off a humble-brag, and a diss on the mother of his three young children, telling Thamel that he was “so young and his wife so attractive” that in his married years, less dazzling folks were inclined not to like him.
For Mrs. Kiffin, the married years meant having babies and dragging them all over the country as Coach tried and failed to keep a job. She’s still caring for the kids, some of whom are old enough to read national magazines and learn that their father resents the 34.5 percent their mom got in the property settlement almost as much as he resents paying “52 percent to Obama.”
On Friday, bachelor Kiffin was in da club, wearing an “aggressive V-neck” and chatting up the coeds. Social media was delighted to see him.
Said one Tweeter to the internet, “If FAU wins a football game for every different girl I saw Lane Kiffin talking to at Club Boca last night you’d be seeing us in the playoffs.”
That’s a consummation devoutly wished for a fourth-rate football program in a city whose name is regularly mispronounced by late night comedians.
