PicoBlog

Iowa Football doesn’t really do coaching searches. I just turned 43 years old, and there has been exactly one head coach vacancy in my lifetime. Perhaps more shocking: There have been just four defensive coordinators since 1979 (Bill Brashier, Bobby Elliott, Norm Parker and Phil Parker) and only six offensive coordinators (Bill Snyder, Carl Jackson, Don Patterson, Ken O’Keefe, Greg Davis, Brian Ferentz). So when a coordinator position opens up, we go to FlightAware and try to have some of the fun that everyone else gets when they can their coach like tuna.

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For the coach of a program that had just won two national championships and came one field goal return short of playing for a third, Nick Saban was certainly doing some soul searching. Alabama finished 11-2 in 2013, despite leading the polls for virtually the entire season. Auburn had replaced Gene Chizik with Gus Malzahn, then bitten them in the Iron Bowl with the Kick Six. Saban realized that his run-game-and-defense philosophy was not going to be enough against his chief rival, and his chief rival stood in the way of championships, a position that was only further enforced when Auburn hung 59 on Mizzou in the SEC Championship.

Saban turned to an unlikely source for help: Lane Kiffin, the former Tennessee and USC coach who had been unceremoniously fired on a Los Angeles tarmac in September. Kiffin’s offensive system made sense for Saban; it was West Coast and pro-style, but it had also evolved beyond three yards and a cloud of dust. As a coordinator, his USC offenses had been so stellar that he’d jumped from college coordinator to NFL head coach.

Kiffin’s personality was another thing entirely. He had been fired from the Raiders with Al Davis calling him “a flat-out liar.” He left Tennessee after one year, in a way that angered everyone in Knoxville. He got into feuds with other coaches, trolled on social media, and generally acted in a manner that would seem anathema to Saban’s typical philosophy.

Nevertheless, Saban brought in Kiffin in December 2013 to perform a top-down review of Alabama’s offense. When coordinator Doug Nussmeier jumped to the same job at Michigan in January, Saban hired Kiffin as his replacement, and revolutionized Alabama’s offense with one hire. Alabama hung 55 on Auburn the following November, and won the SEC running away in 2014. Their relationship was hardly without friction — Saban became notorious for his sideline “ass-chewings” of Kiffin, and dumped him before the 2016 National Championship Game when Kiffin took the head coaching job at Florida Atlantic — but in three seasons they won three Iron Bowls, three SEC Championships, and a National Championship.

When Kiffin left, Saban followed the same template, continuing a string of former head coaches rolling through Tuscaloosa for a crash course in his coaching process. And while his offense is more conservative today than it was under Kiffin, it still is light years beyond where it had been. And for his part, Kiffin became a better coach. He’s still petulant and trollish, but he has applied some of Saban’s lessons at FAU and Ole Miss.

So yes, there are rumors that Scott Frost has interviewed for the Iowa offensive coordinator position. Let’s start with the qualifications before we get into the personalities: Frost, of course, was a National Championship-whining quarterback at Nebraska in the mid-90s. The use of “whining” is not a typo: Frost literally whined to the national press following Nebraska’s bowl win over Tennessee to get half of a championship away from then-consensus No. 1 Michigan. This established a pattern of behavior.

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