Lane Kiffin is hilarious, and I don’t just mean as a person. I mean as an experience. Everywhere Lane Kiffin goes. Every job Lane Kiffin does. Every move Lane Kiffin makes. Hilarity happens. Fired on the tarmac. The target of a thrown mustard bottle. Pretty much the entirety of his stint at FAU. It’s all been funny. It’s all been uproariously funny. Aside from Tennessee fans, Raiders fans, and USC fans, we’ve all had a grand old time, including seemingly Lane Kiffin, and the fact there are two collegiate fanbases and one professional fanbase who’ve had a terrible time just makes the whole thing funnier.
I can’t think of another coach like this. Every other coach I can think of, every football coach I can call to my mind, in both the NFL and in college, across all twenty-however-many football-conscious years of my living, is nothing at all like Lane Kiffin. Not in personality. Not as a hilarity magnet. Not, as I’d like to discuss with you today, in the face.
Lane Kiffin’s face, among those of football coaches, is distinct. Look at this man. Look at this uniquely-faced man:
There are a number of categories of football coach faces. There are the handsome ones—Kliff Kingsbury, Matt LaFleur. There are the big hosses—Andy Reid, Mike McCarthy. There are the ones weathered and leathered by time—Nick Saban, Bill Belichick. There are the ones who look like aliens—Adam Gase, Ed Orgeron. There are, ubiquitously, the ones who look like various dads in your neighborhood—Dabo Swinney, Ryan Day, Jim Harbaugh, etc. And then, there’s Lane Kiffin. His face is softer than most in his line of work, as though it never occurred to him that what’s happening around him is stressful. His expressions are relaxed and a bit resigned, not crushed by defeat, but the expressions of a man who is watching his dog spray diarrhea around the yard and knows he’ll clean it up but isn’t looking forward to doing that. He’s a bit more confused-looking than Pete Carroll, arguably his closest categorical football coach face, but again, not in an overwhelmed way, just in a way where he’s trying really hard to remember what he ate for breakfast and he simply cannot right now, nor is there any reason for him to be trying to remember what he ate for breakfast.
For a long time, baseball scouts did a really dumb thing where they’d evaluate players based on their cheekbones and jawlines. I’m not suggesting we do that with Kiffin. The man’s face has nothing to do with how good or bad he is at his job. But:
I do think it has something to do with the hilarity. It’s a hilarious face. It’s a face to which hilarious things happen.
Live. Laugh. Lane.
