Van Tiffin

Van Leigh Tiffin was born September 6, 1965 in Tupelo, Mississippi and grew up in Red Bay, Alabama, a town of a few thousand people on the Mississippi line in the far northwest corner of the state. He kicked at Red Bay High School and went to Alabama, where he was the Crimson Tide's primary placekicker from 1983 through 1986.

Kickers rarely get standalone entries in a rivalry archive. Tiffin gets one because on November 30, 1985 he produced the single play that more people in both fan bases can describe from memory than any other in the series.

Alabama came into the 1985 Iron Bowl at 7-2-1, Auburn at 8-2. Tiffin kicked three field goals in the first half and Alabama led 16-10 at the break, The third quarter was scoreless. Then the fourth quarter turned into the most volatile in the rivalry's history.

Bo Jackson ran for a touchdown to put Auburn up 17-16. Alabama answered with a 26-yard touchdown run by Gene Jelks for a 22-17 lead. Auburn came back again on a one-yard Reggie Ware touchdown; the conversion failed, and Auburn led 23-22 inside the final minute. That is four lead changes in one quarter.

Ware scored with 57 seconds to play.

Alabama started at its own 20. The first pass fell incomplete and might have been intercepted. On the next snap Mike Shula was sacked for an eight-yard loss, back to the Alabama 12, and Alabama used a timeout with 37 seconds showing. By every account in the record, that is the point at which the game looked finished.

What followed, in four plays: Shula hit Gene Jelks for 14 yards and Jelks got out of bounds at the Alabama 26. Then an end-around, Shula handing to Jelks, who tossed back to Al Bell for 20 yards to the Alabama 46 with 21 seconds left, converting a fourth down. An incompletion cost six seconds. Finally Shula found Greg Richardson for 19 yards to the Auburn 35, and Richardson stopped the clock with six seconds on it. Tiffin came on to kick from the 42, a 52-yard attempt.

It was his fourth made field goal of the afternoon. The kick was good with distance to spare, Alabama won 25-23, and his teammates carried him off the field.

It has been known since as "The Kick." Daniel Moore painted it, which in this state is its own form of canonization.

Reducing Tiffin to one kick undersells him. His longest field goal was 57 yards, against Texas A&M in 1985. He finished his Alabama career having converted 135 consecutive extra points without a miss, a record that stood until his son Leigh Tiffin surpassed it in 2009. He was a first-team All-SEC selection and a Scripps Howard first-team All-American in 1986, after second-team All-SEC honors as a freshman in 1983.

Against Auburn specifically he went 2-2. He lost as a freshman in 1983, the year Bo Jackson ran for 256 yards. He won in 1984, when Alabama upset eleventh-ranked Auburn 17-15. He won in 1985. He lost as a senior in 1986, when Auburn scored late on the play Auburn fans call "The Reverse" to win 21-17. Two of the four games he played in this rivalry were decided in the final minute, and he was on the field for both.

Tiffin went undrafted in 1987 and spent a single NFL season split between the Miami Dolphins and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He returned to Alabama and has worked at Tiffin Motorhomes, the company founded by his father, most recently as a research and development manager. He lives in the Muscle Shoals area.

His son Leigh kicked for Alabama under Nick Saban and was the placekicker on the 2009 national championship team, which makes the Tiffins one of the few families with a placekicking lineage on both sides of a national title era and the most famous kick in the rivalry's history.