Nick Saban shades Lane Kiffin with story of sitting next to Kirby Smart in Alabama staff meetings

Turns out Lane Kiffin added more to Alabama‘s staff meetings than just that week’s offensive game plan. In fact, to hear Nick Saban tell it, the gregarious Ole Miss head coach brought a schoolyard approach to the Crimson Tide coaches’ meetings, where he regularly irritated the more studious Kirby Smart when all three were a part of Alabama’s staff in the mid-2010s.

Ahead of Saturday’s Top 10 SEC showdown between No. 5 Ole Miss and No. 9 Georgia, Saban and Smart both revisited those meetings. Both confirmed how Kiffin used to whisper into the ear of the now-Bulldogs head coach while Saban was in the process of holding court inside the Mal Moore Athletic Complex.

“Let’s be clear, he whispered. I was sitting there quiet saying, ‘Can I move my seat?’” Smart joked during a live appearance on The Pat McAfee Show from the Georgia campus on Friday. “I sat next to Lane in the (Alabama) staff meeting for the couple of years we were there (together), and I was like, ‘Lane, please don’t talk to me during the staff meeting.’ He goes, ‘Why are you so worried about talking during the staff meeting?’ And I was like, ‘It’s disrespectful. I don’t want to talk while (Saban) is talking.’

“This guy didn’t care; he just did it anyways. I told him that all the time. That’s why he gets back at me now, because of all those butt (chewings) he used to get (from Saban).”

Later in the show, Saban confirmed Kiffin’s sophomoric behavior. He described his two divergent coordinators as if they were bickering school children in class.

“They did sit next to each other. Lane was like a first-grader who could not not talk during class, and Kirby was always sitting there saying, ‘I’d never talk in class.’ You know? That’s how different they were,” Saban said Friday during his weekly appearance on The Pat McAfee Show. “But they were really good friends and liked each other. I know they text each other a lot and kid each other a lot about a lot of things right now, and have a tremendous amount of respect for each other as well in terms of what kind of coaches they are and the challenge it is to play each other.

“That was one of the fun things that we had, I think, when our (assistants) started becoming head coaches at other places and we had to play all these guys that used to be assistants. It was kind of fun to have to compete against somebody you had respect for but they were also your really good friends.”

The 49-year-old Smart is in his 10th season as the head coach at his alma mater after 15 years serving under Saban, the last eight as Alabama’s defensive coordinator between 2008-15. The 50-year-old Kiffin was hired as the Crimson Tide’s offensive coordinator ahead of the 2014 season and spent three years rehabbing his coaching career in Tuscaloosa, where both coordinators were instrumental during Alabama’s 2015 national championship-winning season.

A decade later, Kiffin and Smart will meet on the field in a much-anticipated Top 10 showdown at 3:30 p.m. ET Saturday inside Georgia’s Sanford Stadium. The No. 5 Rebels (6-0, 3-0 SEC) are seeking their first 7-0 start since 2022, while the ninth-ranked Bulldogs (5-1, 3-1 SEC) are seeking to avenge last year’s 28-10 loss in Oxford.