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Lane Kiffin is on the move again. Hired by USC to replace Pete Carroll, Kiffin makes his third stop in four years on his head coaching journey, but this time he may be here to stay.

Kiffin played his college football at Fresno State and coached at USC from 2001 to 2006, making this a homecoming of sorts. Since his time at USC as an assistant, Kiffin has made stops in Oakland, coaching the Raiders to a 5-15 record, and more recently the University of Tennessee were he led the Volunteers to a 7-6 record, with his team beginning to show promise in the second have the season.

The way in which Kiffin left Tennessee after only one year at the school has left many shocked, but for many reasons this is a hire that makes sense for both USC and Lane Kiffin.

First, for Kiffin. The new job will most likely come with a nice pay raise and money clearly talks, but more importantly, success at USC is much closer than success at Tennessee. At Tennessee, Kiffin would have to go through a tough SEC schedule, facing top dogs Florida and Georgia each year with meetings against Alabama and LSU every couple season or in potential conference championship games.

Off the field, Tennessee must go south into Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Alabama and fight the respective in-state school for recruits. A tough job, but one which Kiffin was having reasonable success with in his first year. But honeymoon periods tend to end and if Kiffin failed to have great success in his first couple seasons then recruiting would drop off as well.

At USC, success is much easier to find in a now wide open Pac-10 Conference as opposed to in the SEC. One rebuilding year removed from National Power and inheriting a program built a great coach in Pete Carroll, Kiffin comes into a situation where as long as his team is at the stadium in time for the kick-off, they will most likely record a win. This is not necessarily because of the weakness of the Pac-10, but more so because of the sheer number of athletes on the USC roster, which brings recruiting.

USC controls California and most of the West Coast when it comes to recruiting. There is no true competition from UCLA for recruits as USC can, in essence, select the players they would like, as oppose to truly having to recruit them. With the fertile recruiting ground that California is and based on Kiffin’s recruiting success at Tennessee, there is no reason to believe that Kiffin will not be able to select recruits as Pete Carroll did before him (barring recruiting infractions).

From USC’s perspective, the hire makes sense because they replace an excellent recruiting with another excellent recruiting who knows the school and wants to be in Southern California, stating that USC is probably the “only school” that he would leave Tennessee for. The money will be similar to what they paid Carroll and possibly even less. And winning games is something Kiffin should be able to do at SC.

Now, to say that Kiffin will have the same kind of success at USC that Carroll had would be a bold statement as Carroll was one of the best coaches, if not the best coach, of the last decade. But it would not be a stretch to believe that Kiffin will have the Trojans in the running for the Pac-10 crown year in and year out with a national title appearance every five years or so. That is if Kiffin sticks around that long.

That’s something that only time will tell.