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Tennessee coach Lane Kiffin from last night’s edition of Inside College Football on CBS College Sports:
“I’m pretty sure that if we wouldn’t have done some of the things that we did–which I didn’t like, doing everything that I did–I felt they needed to be done for where Tennessee was at when we got here. This isn’t somewhere where we could wait four or five years and have a long term plan. We had to get some significant players right away. Getting Tennessee in the media and getting our staff out there and getting Eric Berry out there and being in Sports Illustrated and being on Sports Center–I promise you that had a lot to do with getting these kids. We signed 5 kids who turned from top five programs in the country to come to us after being 5-7. I know that was part of it. ”
When is someone prominent going to rebuff this nonsense? To be sure, it may be such obvious nonsense that it requires no response.
But still, it’s not like Tennessee is a lousy program without a winning tradition. This is a program that recruits well and has had the ability to compete with the big boys for at least the last 15 years. The current roster includes two top six recruiting classes that were in place when Kiffin arrived. So it’s not like the cupboard is bare.
I understand the need to energize a stagnant program and clearly that was Kiffin’s intention. But explaining away foot-in-mouth disease as some sort of ‘plan’ to help recruiting is just absurd.
More: Dennis Dodd writes here about how Kiffin is holding out for the future, embodied by incoming 2010 quarterback recruit Tyler Bray. Let’s not forget, though, that Kiffin did have a top 10 quarterback already committed to Tennessee when he arrived–the dual-threat Tajh Boyd, who Kiffin said ‘No Thanks’ to and who eventually wound up at Clemson. The problem? Boyd didn’t fit into Kiffin’s ’system’. Seems to me a pretty silly decision to make when your only quarterback options on the roster are so bad. I guess it’s better to lose playing within a system than to have a chance to win playing without it.
Comments
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I actually find it completely plausible that Kiffin was simply trying to drum up interest and buzz for the Tennessee program. As a matter of fact, throughout his tenure as the head man that has just been my assumption for his actions. I don’t really see why you consider this possibility so outrageous.
I think it’s too early to make a judgment call on Kiffin. He’s below .500, but both losses were competitive.
That said, he still has games against Gus Malzahn and Auburn, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and Ole Miss on the schedule. Stay tuned.