Nick Saban shares why he didn’t watch ESPN’s Lane Kiffin documentary

During his appearance on Friday’s edition of The Pat McAfee Show, former Alabama coach Nick Saban talked about his former offensive coordinator, current Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin. But he didn’t have much to say about ESPN’s recent documentary on Kiffin, E60: The Many Lives of Lane Kiffin. Saban didn’t have much to say about it because he didn’t watch the documentary; he lived it.

Boston Connor of The Pat McAfee Show brought the documentary up to Saban, noting that he was portrayed positively, as something of a savior to Kiffin.

“First of all, I didn’t watch the documentary because I lived it for three years,” Saban said. “That was good enough for me. But anyway, I have a tremendous amount of respect for Lane. This guy is a great coach.”

“I have a tremendous amount of respect for Lane Kiffin and he’s a great coach..

He did a great job for us and he’s a great play caller..

He’s matured along the way and I’m glad to see him having success” ~ Coach Saban #PMSLive pic.twitter.com/lVunC57aS6

— Pat McAfee (@PatMcAfeeShow) September 26, 2025

Kiffin has been Ole Miss’s head coach since 2020, but his path to get there was anything but smooth. He was a 32-year-old head coach of the then-Oakland Raiders in 2007, but was fired early in his second season. After coaching at Tennessee for a year, Kiffin moved to USC, where he served as the head coach from 2010 to 2013. In 2013, he was infamously fired at LAX after his team returned home from a road trip. From 2014 to 2016, he worked under Saban as offensive coordinator at Alabama.

Saban lauded Kiffin for transitioning well into an assistant role after being a head coach, something he (Saban) did earlier in his career as a defensive coordinator with the Cleveland Browns under Bill Belichick.

“I think at that station of his life, he’d been a head coach, now he’s got to go back to being an assistant coach, and I actually think that’s a hard transition,” Saban said. “I was a head coach at the University of Toledo for one year, and then I had to go back and work for Belichick as the defensive coordinator in Cleveland, and it’s a hard transition to go from being the boss to taking the orders from somebody else. But he did a great job for us, he’s a great play-caller, and I think he’s matured along the way. And I actually think he’s a much better head coach at this station, or even at the station where we had him, than he was an assistant. But he did a great job of being a very assistant for us.

“And I’m glad to see he’s overcome so much adversity – some of it self-inflicted – to be in a position to have success,” Saban added. “I mean, he’s had success everywhere he’s been since he left Alabama, and he had a tremendous amount of success at Alabama. And it does, in fact, make me really proud to see guys that did a great job for us as coaches on our staff, because they all had goals and aspirations to become coordinators or head coaches, to be able to see them fulfill that. I always tried to make it good for the coaches, so they never wanted to leave. But I also wanted to help them develop so they would get the opportunities that they wanted in the future.”