Lane Kiffin explains origin of his 'GOAT fuel' term about end of Nick Saban's dynasty

You’ve heard of rat poison — Nick Saban’s preferred term for the adulation that can go to a team’s head — but now Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin has coined “GOAT fuel” as a term for undue skepticism powering Saban to prove doubters wrong.

Kiffin debuted the term on Twitter this week when Paul Finebaum wrote a piece saying he thought the Alabama dynasty was winding down. With the Crimson Tide traveling to play Kiffin’s Rebels, he retweeted Finebaum’s article and said Saban didn’t need any more GOAT fuel — though Kiffin used emojis.

“I know people like you say the dynasties coming to an end and it’s over and I really appreciate you upsetting Coach Saban this week,” Kiffin said during a live appearance on the Finebaum show on Friday afternoon.

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Someone in the standing audience shouted “GOAT fuel!”

“Yeah, GOAT fuel,” Kiffin said, pointing in their direction, “as we named it. But there’s a reason we’re double-digit underdogs playing at home where we’ve won for two-straight years. This is a super talented team and you’ve got to do a lot things really well in order to have a shot.”

Finebaum asked Kiffin if he’d been thinking of the term for a while or if it was off the cuff. Kiffin’s answer: It’s Twitter, it’s pretty much all off the cuff.

“No that’s like five seconds, Paul,” Kiffin said. “There’s not a lot of thought in most of my Twitter things. It’s kind of five seconds, different term — cause it’s really the opposite of rat poison. Rat poison is telling someone how great they are and they buy into it. This is opposite. You’re telling them ‘Hey man, his career’s kind of over, he should hang it up.’ And so that’s the exact opposite. So we had to figure out an opposite term from rat poison.”

Finebaum did seek to clarify one point from his piece while defending his argument.

“I would like to say, I don’t think I ever suggested his career was over. I just said that the window of this dynasty — which by the way you played a big part in — that window seems to be closing,” Finebaum said.

Kiffin joked with Finebaum that he only put it on social media to boost Finebaum’s following. And no matter what, one thing is clear: Kiffin still has the utmost respect for Alabama.

“Yeah. I mean, I may have peppered it a little bit. I wanted you to get some more followers, I wanted you to get your Twitter up,” Kiffin said. “My thought was, on that, when you see things not necessarily coming to an end but coming off the top, programs coming off the top, you don’t see it being one-play games, in my opinion. The two games they lost could go either way on two of the hardest places to play in the country. You see a team losing by 14, 17 points, then you start to say, ‘OK, are they not the same anymore?’ These guys are really hard to beat. They have by far the best player in America at the most important position. So any time you have that, regardless of what’s around him, you have a chance to be a really special team and a really hard team to beat.”