Lane Kiffin Tried Almost Everything To Steal AJ McCarron From Nick Saban, Even Sneaking Around Jeremy Pruitt

Sometimes it helps to make sure you are staking out the right house when on the recruiting trail, or trying to make sure another team doesn’t swoop in and steal your committed player. For AJ McCarron, the former Alabama quarterback had quite the tale from the months leading up to him signing with Nick Saban, thanks to Lane Kiffin and Jeremy Pruitt. 

If there's one thing about recruiting in college football, it's that you had better have your area marked off, especially when a new coaching staff comes in, looking to poach a player you've been recruiting for a few years. 

For AJ McCarron, the former St. Paul's high school quarterback was the talk of the town in Mobile, Alabama. And when I say AJ was the most-talked-about prospect in my home city that year, I mean it. 

Well, that meant other schools were going to recruit you until the papers were signed, which also meant newly hired Tennessee coach Lane Kiffin was going to take a swing at AJ McCarron in hopes of stealing him away from Nick Saban. 

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And the story that came from those last few months of his recruitment turned out to be gold, thanks to Lane Kiffin bringing his entire offensive staff from Tennessee down to the Mobile area, just to speak with AJ McCarron. 

"It was December of 2008, this is probably two months from signing day," McCarron recalled on his podcast ‘Dynasty’. Jeremy Pruitt had been hired to take over our area, and coach Saban was like ‘hey, i want you to go down, AJ had said Tennessee had started to hit him up, Lance (Thompson) is from down there, so go down, watch his house. I wanna know if Lance is trying to backdoor us and steal him away’. Pruitt comes down, and he's sitting in front of the house, and he had been there about two days. 

"One morning, I'm knocked out, dad's at the fire station, I'm sleeping. All the sudden, I got a bang on my window, bedroom window. ‘Bam Bam Bam’, I wake up and was like who the hell is banging on my window? I open up the blinds, and it's Lane (Kiffin) and Lance who are leaning down near my window (waving). I look behind them and it's the whole offensive coaching staff for Tennessee, outside my window. All you hear is Lance ‘Let me in! Let us in!’."

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Just imagine Nick Saban's reaction when he discovers that Jeremy Pruitt had botched his only job when it came to securing AJ McCarron like he was a diamond locked in a vault. 

"Coach Saban calls me, ‘What you doing boy?," AJ McCarron recalled. "Oh, just getting my day going, but I just had a full-on interview, meeting with the whole Tennessee staff. He said, ‘what do you mean?’. Well, the whole staff was down here in my living room , and we were here for about 30-45 minutes. 

"He said, ‘I told Pruitt’s ass to get down there and watch your house, let me call him'. 

Nick Saban then proceeded to call Jeremy Pruitt to ask him ‘what the hell he was doing’, since his only job was to guard the house of McCarron to make sure no other team was to stop by for a visit. 

It was at that moment that AJ McCarron told the perfect ending to the story, as he described Jeremy Pruitt speaking with an irate Nick Saban about his failure to maintain the perimeter. 

"Nothing coach, I'm sitting in front of McCarron's house like you told me," AJ said of Pruitt's response. Which led to Nick Saban drilling Jeremy Pruitt on where he was actually at in the Mobile area. Turns out, Pruitt was about to get the surprise of a lifetime. 

Jeremy Pruitt was parked outside the wrong house while making sure nobody visited AJ McCarron on a recruiting  visit (Photo by Ed Zurga/Getty Images)

Jeremy then told Nick Saban that nobody had been to the house, or even showed up in the area. 

"He then says, ‘let me go check’. He knocks on the door, a little old lady down the street from me answers the door, to which Pruitt responds, "Is AJ here?"

Turns out, Jeremy Pruitt had been parked in front of the wrong house for two days straight, and had been staking out a residence that was actually down the street from where the coveted quarterback actually lived. 

"He lives six houses down that way," AJ McCarron jokingly recalled the lady saying to Jeremy Pruitt. 

If we could get some of these coaches to sit around a table and tell some of the stories from the recruiting trail while televising it on the SEC Network, it might out-draw a few NBA playoff games.