Superb article on Lane Kiffin

hey may be considered a dickhead but he'll be a great coach at tennessee.

Kiffin has gotten into trouble quicker at Tennessee than Richard Pryor did trying to do network TV.

Half this article is just Kiffin hyping himself. According to this article, Kiffin is a psychological predator when it comes to recruits and romance. This is a classic rehab job article. Requisite referencing of some of his more ludicrous moments during the first two months on the job is followed by awestruck praise and admiration. Why did this taint feel it so necessary to poach so many big names to his program? Because he knows he doesn't know a damn thing about coaching and he's hoping the gravitas and experience of these oldsters will make up his lack of ability. I seriously doubt that geriatric Monte Kiffin is putting on seven 17 hour days (as kiffin said, 5:30 Am to 10:30 PM). This is the classic bullshit spiel of a manager. Kiffin is probably knocking off at 6 PM every night, telling everybody that he is going to watch film. Then he goes to Hooters, has a beer, then goes home and watches Entourage. He's a bitch. We should have scheduled Tennessee as the first game next year.

Color me unconvinced about Kiffin. He's proven nothing yet as an HC, and the fact that he disdained the idea of working his way up at smaller schools is indicative of an arrogance that makes Charlie Weis look like a Jesuit monk on a fast. He's a spoiled brat who grew up in a privileged football position due to his father's connections and name. And what's even more remarkable is the near-adulatory tone of the article as it's describing what a colossal asswipe Kiffin is, such as the hand-rubbing glee he took in "running off" people. Contrast this with the negative press Rich Rodriguez has gotten since the day he was hired, and all the horseshit "family values" crap. Rich Rodriguez wasn't too proud to work his way up from a DIII school to where he's at now. The only thing Kiffin has going for him is that he was smart enough to hire Orgeron, who is a tremendous recruiter. Kiffin is going to make enemies much faster than he's going to make friends, and eventually that's a recipe for disaster on and off the field.

This whole Kiffin episode is part of a larger trend that irks me. Arrogance is always destructive, as was said above. But I hear more arrogance come out of the mouths of people like Kiffin everyday. Confidence is a good thing. A person who is confident has faith that they can achieve things at the highest level. They know that they are blessed with extraordinary abilities and that they can accomplish something to be proud of if they give everything that they have. Arrogant people simply believe that they will trample all others due to their superior abilities. Confidence and arrogance can be conflated. I Believe that RichRod is confident. He took on a job with a lot of pressure, a fierce in-conference rivalry, and a dearth of experience. He is putting the work in to build the program into a winner. Thank God he was not arrogant and did not set the team up for even more humiliation than they experienced already this past year. But he could have been arrogant. I watched West Virginia quite a bit in the 2006 and 2007 seasons. I admired the coach, and I was actually pulling for Michigan to take him before his name even surfaced. He has a proven record of success and true fans know that good things will come to us if we are patient. Once this little prick Kiffin gets bitch slapped around a little bit in the SEC, Vols fans will see how destructive arrogance can be. They will be the laughingstock of the SEC. Their coach does not yet know how to lead a team. It will be bleak.

read the rest of page five of that article before they shortened it. Apparently, he also nailed a "Raiderette", he wouldn't give Al Davis any of his money back after he got fired, some secretaries say they saw him shredding "suspicious" documents at the Coliseum, he approved a radical change to Tennessee's uniforms (replacing the "T" on the helmets with a silhouette of Carrot Top's head"), kicked off a bunch of players (one of them just transferred to Florida after claiming that Lane said "mean things" to him), replaced Smokey with a new mascot named "Trojan Man!", promised the number 16 jersey to a freshman qb, replaced the orange/white checkerboard pattern in the end zones with a "$$$$$" motif, changed the nickname of the flotilla of boats around Neyland stadium from "Volunteer Navy" to "Volunteer Nation", claimed that he'd never heard Rocky Top before, and lastly, stated that he would no longer recruit players from the state of Tennessee. What an asshat!

agreed that he's a giant douche. Any other profession and his priorities would lead him into legal trouble. People seem to confuse arrogance with confidence. There is a big difference between the arrogance coached into players at USC (who go on to behave like tools on tv) and the confidence/professionalism of coaches like Rich Rod. This is one aspect in which Rich has a lot in common with previous Michigan coaches - he realizes that his job is to teach boys how to become good men and good football players.