Monday, February 9, 2009
Kotz / Sports CBS Sports Blisters Lane Kiffin
Posted by Pete Kotz on Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 12:48 PM
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Forgive new Tennessee football coach Lane Kiffin for accusing Florida coach Urban Meyer cheating last week, thus violating collegiate the rules of polite duplicity. Kiffin was wrong about the accusation, but every coach rips his rivals privately on the recruiting trail. His bigger sin was dogging Meyer publicly, rather than offering the usual platitudes of admiration. 
Chalk it up to a minor breach of etiquette.
Yet CBS columnist Gregg Doyel isn't seeing it that way. He used the episode to go ape shit with outrage of sphincterific proportions, denouncing Kiffin as a football silver spooner whose "train is already derailing." He argues that Kiffin does't have the juice to denounce a budding legend like Meyer:
"And that's why Lane Kiffin was the wrong guy to try what he tried. When you're born on third base and fool yourself into thinking you've hit a triple, you lack the status to call out the biggest, baddest coach on your block. That's why this whole thing backfired on Kiffin. Because he was the wrong guy."
Unfortunately, Doyel is just getting started. He goes on to slice Kiffin as if the coach once rejected him as a romantic suitor, leaving him simmering in... well... we're not quite sure.
Kiffin has no status, no standing, no résumé. He was born sucking on Daddy's silver spoon, the son of longtime NFL assistant Monte Kiffin using his DNA to get a job with Pete Carroll at Southern California. Rural Kiffin then tapped into the charisma of Carroll and the tradition of USC and the glamour of Los Angeles, and used all of that to become known, by knuckleheads, as a recruiting whiz. Sure he is. You, too, could be a recruiting whiz for Pete Carroll at USC. So could I.
Rural Kiffin is no whiz. He has accomplished nothing. Do you understand me? Nothing. The NFL's most deranged owner hired him as coach, but that says more about Al Davis than Kiffin. But going 5-15 with Oakland says plenty about Kiffin.
Look, the guy's going to flop at Tennessee. You know it. I know it. Hell, I knew it before he was hired. Here's what I wrote in October, five weeks before he got the Tennessee job, about the Lane Kiffin Candidacy Phenomenon. I knew his fake résumé, like a rapper's gold teeth, would attract some weak soul's attention. Knew he'd be hired. Figured he'd fall on his face.
You can only imagine what Doyel will have to say once Kiffin's actually coached a game.
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