Wednesday night, a new edition of ESPN E60 premieres with an examination of the life and career of Ole Miss head football coach Lane Kiffin, long one of the most fascinating and polarizing figures in sports.
“The Many Lives of Lane Kiffin” debuts on Wednesday, Sept. 24, at 7 p.m. ET on ESPN on the ESPN App. An extended version will be available on the ESPN App after the debut.
Ryan McGee, ESPN Senior Writer and college football historian, was reporter on the one-hour special, which was produced and directed by Jason Kostura and Madeline Rundlett.
McGee said that Kostura approached him about doing an E60 on college football.
“It was probably a year ago,” McGee said. “He’s a huge college football guy and we had worked together on ‘The Intimidator’ E60. And he asked me ‘what should we be doing on college football?’ And my response was we need to do something on Lane Kiffin.
“And we knew that Lane wasn’t participating in some other projects that were going on and so we pitched it to him, and he actually said yes really, really quickly. My expectations were very high.”
I don’t think anyone really understood how much Lane Kiffin has changed just in the last couple of years, and I certainly was not aware that he believed he was in the middle of a pretty serious battle with alcohol. – Ryan McGee
McGee has known Kiffin since childhood, when McGee’s father was an ACC college football referee and he would see Kiffin at games and practices accompanying Kiffin’s father, former NC State coach Monte Kiffin.
But he said he still learned some things he didn’t know about the Ole Miss coach while working on the E60.
“I don’t think anyone really understood how much Lane Kiffin has changed just in the last couple of years, and I certainly was not aware that he believed he was in the middle of a pretty serious battle with alcohol,” McGee said.
“And so as he approached the age of 50, I think he’s changed much more than people realize, but the good news is he’s still got plenty of old-school smart-aleck Lane in him because if he didn’t have that it would be pretty sad.”
McGee hopes viewers will also learn how Kiffin — whose collegiate head coaching journey began in 2007 at the University of Tennessee before he accepted the job at USC the next year and later became an assistant at Alabama — has evolved.
“A lot of people believe that they think that they know who he is based on their experiences with him whether it was at Knoxville, or USC, Alabama or anywhere else,’’ McGee said, “and there’s certainly pieces of that guy in there that they think they know, but I think that the sum of the parts has created someone that they do not know.”
Kiffin’s Ole Miss team takes on SEC rival LSU on Saturday, Sept. 27, at 3:30 p.m. ET on ABC.
-
-
-
-
