Lane Kiffin Deserves a Thank You for Culture Change at USC

Lane Kiffin might be the most misunderstood man in Southern California.

When he arrived in Los Angeles dodging a sea of expletives and burning mattresses being chucked at him all the way from Knoxville, no one was really sure why he was Pete Carroll’s successor.

To be fair, it was never going to be fair. The man who was going to follow Carroll was going to have it rough.

But most people were like the L.A. Times' Bill Plaschke and asked, “What was Mike Garrett thinking?”

I, too, was a tad skeptical.

I knew Kiffin was a stunning recruiter with impossibly high standards from his previous stint at USC (where anything less than a national championship was a failure), and he was bringing Ed Orgeron and his father Monte Kiffin along with him. All those seemed like good things.

But he was loud. And boisterous. And that just doesn’t work in the second-largest media market in the world. The Trojans’ reputation was already being called into question with the results of a four-year NCAA investigation right around the corner.

So I sat in the press conference in January of 2010, a masters student and aspiring journalist, listening for a clue, some sort of strand of hope, that Kiffin knew what I did.

I thought he did. Fighting the jet lag and a bad case of nerves, he promptly told the Trojan family that he didn’t need to do what he did at Tennessee in Heritage Hall. With two daughters restlessly playing around his legs after a long flight, he looked us all in the eye and told us what we needed to hear.

Maybe he gets it, I thought. Maybe he gets USC.

And maybe that’s why Garrett hired him. Remember, no one liked it when he hired Pete Carroll either.

The first year was rough. Really rough. He went in and changed the whole nature of the program. It wasn’t fun.

Orgeron repeated the words “toughness and discipline” until he was blue in the face. They were told to clean up their lockers and clean up their acts.

This wasn’t the program that Orgeron and Kiffin had left circa 2006.

After an 8-5 season, it still wasn’t. Did Garrett get the wrong guy?

But then Kiffin brought in a top-five recruiting class. Some of the team leaders talked to him and found some middle ground. Fun found a place between toughness and discipline.

Then he started talking to the media differently. He was still quiet, but he slowly got used to the hordes of familiar faces asking familiar questions. He realized most of us weren’t out to get him. He even showed us a sense of humor a few times.

Even Bill Plaschke changed his tune.

So even though the entire SEC still hates him (and always will), the West Coast has finally decided that he’s all right.

No one really expected a 10-2 season while still under a postseason ban. And no one realized how good of a recruiter he was until NCAA decided to give him an extra challenge and he still brought in 4- and 5-star recruits.

Now he has a chance, after only two seasons, to take USC back to a national championship.

One year didn’t make a difference, but now it’s been almost three—and things are very different around USC.

Oddly enough, you have Lane Kiffin to thank for that.