The Monte Kiffin talk Arkansas football coach Sam Pittman won’t forget

DALLAS — Before Monte Kiffin became a Bucs legend as the architect of a Super Bowl-winning defense, he was an assistant at Arkansas — one who had a small but important impact on the Razorbacks’ current coach.

Sam Pittman was a high school player in Grove, Oklahoma, and remembers Kiffin coming to one of his games. Not to watch Pittman, a future NAIA recruit to Pittsburg State. To see Todd Berry, an all-state quarterback who later signed with Tulsa.

“He was not there to see any of the Grove Ridgerunners,” Pittman said.

But Kiffin — who died last week at age 84 — saw the Grove Ridgerunners, anyway. After their close loss, Kiffin wanted to do more than see them. He asked to talk to them.

“He came in and said some unbelievable things about our toughness and fight and our grit,” Pittman said Thursday during SEC media days.

“I remember the impact that his speech, that it made on me. I thought, you know, as I become a coach, how we can change lives and how we can be meaningful to young athletes, young people by the way that Coach Kiffin talked to us that day. I’ll never forget that as long as I live.”

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