Lane Kiffin just polished off a 9-3 regular season in his first year at FAU
By Jack Crosby
Laugh at Lane Kiffin all you want, but he just completed one hell of a first regular season as the head coach of Florida Atlantic.
After serving a stint as the Alabama offensive coordinator, often being berated by Nick Saban on the sidelines, Lane Kiffin returned to the head coaching ranks this season, getting a fresh start for himself. With no bigger programs wanting to take a chance on the controversial coach, the only place he was welcome as a head coach was down in Boca Raton, leading the Florida Atlantic Owls, who were coming off an abysmal 3-9 season in 2016.
Through four games of his first season as coach of the Owls, Kiffin was the butt of everyone’s jokes as he and his team began the 2017 campaign at 1-3 with games against Navy, Wisconsin, and Buffalo not coming out in their favor. Kiffin couldn’t even succeed with lowly Florida Atlantic, providing some justification for those that were screaming he wasn’t ready for the head coaching ranks once again.
Well, what has happened since that loss to Buffalo of the MAC has made everyone take a step back and eat some crow.
Kiffin and the Owls have not lost a game since the defeat at the hands of the Bulls, capping it all off on Saturday in the final week of the regular season with a 31-12 win over Charlotte to finish at 9-3, a complete turnaround from last year. Now, Kiffin will have a chance to really make detractors question how they viewed him as a head coach if he and his team can pick up a Conference USA championship win next weekend over North Texas.
This year for Kiffin and the Owls has been no fluke, either. Considered an offensive mind, the Owls entered the final week of the regular season ranked 18th in the country in total offense at 472.6 yards per game. And people may also forget that in the loss to Wisconsin, a team that could very well be in the College Football Playoff as champions of the Big Ten, FAU played the Badgers a lot closer than people may think, being down just 10 at the half at Camp Randall Stadium. This is a dangerous team, and considering where they were at just last year, a lot of what this team has done simply has to be attributed to the coaching attributes of Kiffin.
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Some may still be of the belief that Kiffin will never again be ready to lead a prominent program, but after the season he just capped off with Florida Atlantic, the prevalent discussions about him getting a second chance at the big time need to be started up in a serious manner.