Former Football Coach Kiffin Dies at 84

Monte Kiffin left NC State more than 40 years ago after an unremarkable three-year stint as NC State’s head football coach, posting a 16-17 record from 1980-82. He was part of a trio of consecutive coaches who stayed four years or fewer.

Yet when Kiffin, 84, died late last week, memories from Wolfpack grid fans poured in, a remarkable show for a coach known for his defensive brilliance in the National Football League but who never had another head coaching job in the collegiate or professional ranks.

That’s likely because Kiffin, a native of Lexington, Nebraska, was a unique character known for off-field antics that drew local and national attention to his program at a time when neighboring UNC-Chapel Hill was ranked in college football’s top 10. The Wolfpack needed an identity; and Kiffin, a former player at Nebraska and a longtime assistant at Arkansas who was hired in late 1979 on the recommendation of Lou Holtz, had the personality to create one.

For his first pep rally with students, Kiffin dressed in red-and-white cowboy clothes — complete with a red 10-gallon hat — and galloped on horseback from Mission Valley Shopping Center to the University Student Center, where he greeted a large crowd gathered by the fountains in the plaza.

In 1981, two days before the Wolfpack played North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Kiffin stepped into a homemade boxing ring in Reynolds Coliseum with former heavyweight boxing champion Joe Frazier, who was on campus to give a speech at Stewart Theatre. They circled the ring for 90 seconds, Kiffin touched the pompons Frazier was using for boxing gloves and the bout was declared a tie.

Another time, again for a pep rally, Kiffin promised the student body he would jump out of a helicopter onto the open field between Sullivan Residence Hall and Doak Field. Sure enough, on the day of the event, a helicopter appeared above the crowd. It descended all the way down to about two feet above the ground, at which point Kiffin jumped out, landed upright on the turf and raised his arms in victory. Promise fulfilled.

As an assistant at Nebraska, Kiffin had to be talked out of wrestling an alligator before the Cornhuskers played in the Gator Bowl.

At NC State he inherited a team that had won the 1979 ACC championship. Even though he had an excellent young coaching staff, which included future Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, and his teams posted winning records in two of his three seasons, Kiffin never took the Wolfpack to a postseason bowl game and never had a winning record in Atlantic Coast Conference play.

Kiffin’s first team finished 6-5, thanks in part to a win over unranked Clemson and back-to-back wins over Duke and East Carolina to finish the season.

In his second season, Kiffin’s Pack won four of its first five games and was leading fourth-ranked and defending ACC champion North Carolina 10-0 at the half, when Kiffin made a coaching decision that haunted the rest of his stay in Raleigh. After noticing that the Tar Heel blockers would always immediately drop back on every kickoff, Kiffin called for an onside kick to start the second half at Carter-Finley Stadium.

The kick took one hop into the arms of a UNC blocker, and the Tar Heels scored just a few plays later to completely shift the game’s momentum in a 21-10 victory. The Wolfpack didn’t win another game that season.

In his third season, the Wolfpack lost games to five opponents that were all ranked at some point during the season: Maryland, North Carolina, Clemson, Penn State and Miami.

“We needed one more year,” Kiffin said in a 2020 interview. “We thought we could be successful. We had a good team coming back.

“[But] I’ll be honest with you, we didn’t win enough games.”

Kiffin was never a head coach again. He went to the NFL, where he spent some 30 years as one of the most influential defensive minds in pro football history. He is widely credited with the invention of the often-imitated “Tampa 2” defense, developed while he was the defensive coordinator for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Kiffin’s two sons, Lane and Chris, were both born in Raleigh during their father’s NC State tenure, both played college football and both followed their father into coaching. Lane Kiffin is the head coach at Mississippi, while Chris is the linebacker’s coach for the NFL Houston Texans.