Tim Peeler: Remembering former NC State coach Monte Kiffin
Editor’s note: This story originally ran in The Wolfpacker magazine in 2020. Monte Kiffin, who spent three seasons at the head coach at NC State, died Thursday. He was 84.
There was no one quite like Monte Kiffin.
Hired 44 years ago as NC State’s head football coach, the former Nebraska player and assistant was a protégé of Bob Devaney and Tom Osborne and an assistant of former NC State coach Lou Holtz at Arkansas. He was a defensive genius who had a long career as an assistant coach and defensive coordinator in the National Football League.
And as much as Wolfpack fans know about the antics of Holtz, basketball coach Jim Valvano and a cast of other coaching characters through the years, Kiffin is unique among them all, a three-year legacy that is still vivid in program annals some four decades later.
What do you expect from someone who had to be talked out of wrestling an alligator one year at the Orange Bowl as an assistant coach?
Who else would dress up in red-and-white clothes with a cowboy hat and mask to interrupt the NC State orchestra’s spring concert by riding in on a white horse as they played “The William Tell Overture,” just to promote his first spring football game? Kiffin did.
Who else would strap on a parachute and jump out of a helicopter – from no more than five feet off the ground – the day before his first career game at his only head coaching job? Kiffin did.
Who else, just before the first time he ever faced rival North Carolina, would get into the ring at Reynolds Coliseum with former heavyweight boxing champion Joe Frazier, who wore a Natural Light T-shirt that said “Smoke Carolina” on the back, for a one-round title bout as part of a students-only pep rally? Kiffin did.
“I’ve got a little Lou Holtz, a little Bo Rein and a lot of Monte Kiffin in me,” he said when introduced as Rein’s successor by Chancellor Joab Thomas on Dec. 5, 1979. “I’m going to carry on the tradition here and build on it – make it bigger and bigger.”
Sadly, that was not to be. 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. After three seasons, and a 16-17 overall record, Kiffin resigned under pressure from athletics boosters.
Many still believe – and Kiffin is among them – the coach never really survived his unusual hiring.
NC State had won the ACC championship in 1979 under the guidance of Holtz protégé Bo Rein but did not play in a postseason bowl game. Rein, after four years at the helm as the nation’s youngest head coach, jumped at an offer to become the head coach at LSU.
At the same time, East Carolina’s Pat Dye resigned after six successful seasons as head coach at East Carolina, which included the 1976 Southern Conference championship an appearance in the 1978 Independence Bowl. Even Dye assumed he would become the head coach of the Wolfpack. All the Georgia native had to do was win over a committee of seven prominent supporters of the program that made up the steering committee to hire a coach for athletics director Willis Casey, who was unavailable to make the decision because he was in a prolonged hospital stay.
“Pat Dye was going to get the job, so I flew in there to meet the committee as sort of an underdog candidate,” Kiffin says today. “Mr. Casey was in the hospital and I never met him while I was there. I talked to the committee and got the feeling they weren’t going to hire me.
“[Former All-American running back] Willie Burden drove me back to the airport and said ‘Tell Coach Holtz I said hello’ and I figured that was it.”
However, as the committee mulled over a bitter interview Dye gave in the Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer a few days after his resignation – in which Dye blasted the ECU chancellor and athletics director for not supporting his program, for shortchanging his assistant coaches and for not appreciating his team’s success – it soured on his candidacy.
Chancellor Joab Thomas told the members to quickly turn their attention to the other main candidates, Kiffin and Navy head coach George Welsh. With a push from Holtz, who still had influence in Raleigh despite his abrupt departure following the 1975 season, Kiffin was offered the job.
“I was making a connection flight and they pulled me off the plane and told me to get back to Raleigh, they wanted to offer me the job,” Kiffin says.
Kiffin was eager to get started, and eager playfully to compete with NC State’s other new head coach, a kid by the name of Jim Valvano, who had just taken over as men’s basketball coach for the departed Norm Sloan, for attention on campus.
In the early days, Kiffin won out with antics that caught the eye of local and national media, especially when he took his team to play national powers like Penn State and Miami and the ACC powers of the time, Maryland, Clemson and North Carolina.
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 4th-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 drop immediately back on every kickoff, Kiffin called for an onsides kick to start the second half at Carter-Finley Stadium.
The kick took one hop into the arms of a UNC blocker, 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 one point in the season: Maryland, Norh Carolina, Clemson, Penn State and Miami. It didn’t help that Tiger coach Danny Ford, whose team won the school’s first national championship in 1981 and immediately drew the attention of NCAA investigators, accused Kiffin and his staff of turning the Tigers in for violations.
At midfield of Carter-Finley, the two coaches got into a heated exchange that was caught on audio tape.
“My ass you didn’t turn us in,” Ford said.
“I didn’t tell them…I didn’t tell them,” Kiffin answered.
“Who did?” Ford asked.
“I never did,” Kiffin said. “I never turned you in… They came up here. I don’t know.”
Afterwards, the two coaches seethed over the incident, especially when the tape was played on local airwaves. Kiffin maintained he never reported Clemson to the NCAA.
“But if I had,” he said back then, “I wouldn’t have been wrong.”
The next week, the Wolfpack whipped South Carolina, but bookend blowouts to Penn State (54-0) and Miami (41-3) with a win over Duke in between put Kiffin’s job in jeopardy.
“We needed one more year,” Kiffin said. “We thought we could be successful. We had a good team coming back.”
Immediately after the season, Kiffin asked for a one-year contract extension while some of the school’s biggest donors pressured Casey to make a coaching change. Eventually, Kiffin chose to resign – after he got salary guarantees for his assistants.
At the time, he cited the lack of athletic administration support. Even today, while he holds no grudges against the late Casey, he believes that to be true.
“I’ll be honest with you, we didn’t win enough games,” Kiffin says. “But, with all respect to Mr. Casey, when I was hired, he was sick in the hospital and I was always the guy he didn’t hire.”
Kiffin was never a head coach again. He went to the NFL, where he became one of the most influential defensive minds in college and pro football history. He served as a player personnel analyst for his oldest son Lane, at Ole Miss until his death Thursday.
His youngest son Chris, who was born in Raleigh during Kiffin’s NC State tenure, is the defensive line coach for the NFL’s Houston Texans.
Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.
The post Tim Peeler: Remembering former NC State coach Monte Kiffin appeared first on On3.
