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Ole Miss football coach Lane Kiffin has made coaching stops at 11 universities. Duke coach Manny Diaz at nine.
It’s difficult to coach that long and criss-cross the country as much as the two opposing coaches in the 80th TaxSlayer Gator Bowl (Thursday, 8:05 p.m., EverBank Stadium, ESPN) have and somehow not work on the same staff at some point.
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But there is a connection. And it started in Jacksonville.
Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin worked for the Jacksonville Jaguars one season, in 2000, as a defensive quality control coach.
Kiffin was a 25-year-old defensive quality control coach on Tom Coughlin’s staff in 2000, answering to coordinator Dom Capers. It was Kiffin’s third coaching job, after brief stops at Fresno State and Colorado State.
“It was a really neat year here,” Kiffin said of his time with the Jaguars on Jan. 1 at a Gator Bowl coaches “Fireside Chat” at the WJCT Studios.
At the same time, Diaz was a graduate assistant coach at N.C. State. The offensive coordinator for the Wolfpack, Norm Chow, was moving across the country to join Pete Carroll’s staff at USC, and he was pushing Carroll to hire Diaz to be his tight ends coach.
Duke coach Manny Diaz, who started as a defensive graduate assistant at Florida State and NC State, nearly crossed over to offense for a job at USC.
”I’m a defensive GA and you’re just trying to get a break,” Diaz said about moving on the other side of the ball. “Norm tells me he’s talked to Pete and he thinks he’s got Pete convinced to hire me, but there’s one last guy he wants to check with — a quality control coach at Jacksonville, but he thinks he wants to stay in the NFL.”
Yes. That would be Kiffin.
”If [Kiffin] stays in the NFL, then I will be an offensive coach at…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/gator-bowl-lane-kiffin-jacksonville-101319049.html
Author : The Florida Times-Union
Publish date : 2025-01-02 10:13:00
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