It was around this time that Kiffin’s most famous nickname debuted: Joey Freshwater.
The story goes that Kiffin, not wanting to say his real name when recognized in local bars, would tell women his name was Joey Freshwater. There are those who were around Tuscaloosa at that time who insist this was a real thing he did. “The Joey Freshwater thing, it got out there for a reason,” says Trevor Hewett, who worked at Innisfree in addition to covering the team. Kiffin wasn’t the first Alabama assistant to enjoy an adult beverage on the town after the game, nor would he be the last, but he wasn’t subtle about it the way others were to avoid Saban’s wrath. “Lane was visible publicly in a time where Alabama coaches were not visible publicly,” Hewett says. “The other coaches just never went out, and Lane was definitely different in that aspect. Lane was going to be in public at times, sometimes at very odd times during the season.”
The more Hewett thought about it, the more impressed he was that it had mostly stayed as scuttlebutt and never morphed into a public scandal. In some ways, he said half-jokingly, it was Kiffin’s biggest accomplishment while at Alabama. “The fact he made it out of Tuscaloosa without anything becoming super public is wild,” he says.
In 2017, radio host Clay Travis asked Kiffin directly about the Joey Freshwater nickname.
Kiffin denied it as only he could.
“I’ve used Jimmy Chestnut but not Joey Freshwater,” he said. “Someone told me Joey Freshwater is the best thing I’ve ever heard, and I said, ‘Well, his friend is Jimmy Chestnut and is just as good.’”
True or not, those rumors hurt his ability to become a head coach again. Multiple Alabama sources insisted that Kiffin’s behavior during his time in Tuscaloosa precluded him from ever succeeding Nick Saban and becoming the Crimson Tide’s head coach. He had upset too many important people, and the stories were too well-known for it to be palatable for those in power. College administrators viewed him as immature and a liability, even if he was having a lot of on-field success as Saban’s offensive coordinator.
Near the end of the 2016 season, it was clear Kiffin needed to seek employment elsewhere.
There were multiple big-time programs that needed new coaches that cycle, from heavyweights like Texas and LSU to the Phil Knight–backed Oregon. Despite his best efforts, Kiffin couldn’t get much traction anywhere. “It’s not a question of his coaching ability,” search consultant Chuck Neinas told me at the time. “It’s a question of . . . other things.”
Neinas, who had previously been commissioner of the Big Eight, had a network of people he could call to give it to him straight. When it came to Kiffin, he believed the off-the-field rumors hurt his candidacy.
“There are no secrets in the coaching profession,” Neinas said. “The CIA would marvel at the intelligence that goes on.” Says one athletic director on the prospect of hiring Kiffin, “The carousing and womanizing and all that kind of stuff and drinking and anything else was something you were just going to have to deal with.”
