For at least the second time in franchise history, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers have been “jilted at the altar.”

Those infamous words came out of the mouth of former owner Hugh Culverhouse, who uttered them after Bill Parcells broke a handshake agreement to become the Bucs’ head coach in 1992. If Culverhouse were still alive to this day, he may have said the same thing about Chip Kelly.

According to a report by KGW NewsChannel 8 in Portland, the Bucs were in the process of finalizing a deal on Sunday night that would have made Kelly their next head coach. The St. Petersburg Times confirmed the report and for roughly 10 hours it appeared as though Kelly would bring his explosive zone-read offense to the pros.

But on Monday morning, Kelly reversed field and decided not to accept the Bucs’ head-coaching job. While he said he was flattered by the Bucs’ interest, Kelly ultimately decided that his heart was in Oregon and thus, a deal that was reportedly “done” on Sunday evening had fallen through. Once again, the Bucs are now back to square one in their search for Raheem Morris’ replacement.

But for a moment, we can at least discuss what it would have been like had Chip Kelly’s offense been brought to the NFL. As offensive coordinator in 2007 and ’08, and as head coach since 2009, Oregon has had one of the most dynamic offenses in college football under Kelly. He’s aggressive, innovative, and he isn’t afraid to try something new. He’s also known as a disciplinarian, which would have been a far cry from the way Raheem Morris ran things in Tampa.

His hiring would have also reeked of Steve Spurrier.

Dan Snyder gave Spurrier $25 million to bring his “Fun ‘n’ gun” offense to the NFL and the experiment lasted only two years as the Redskins went 12-20 over that span. Washington finished in the bottom of the league in every major offensive category under Spurrier, including total yards per game, passing efficiency and yards per attempt.

But Spurrier never acquired enough talent to run his offense either. He thought he could win with Shane Matthews, Danny Wuerffel and Patrick Ramsey, but all three usually wound up looking out of their ear holes because Washington’s offensive line couldn’t keep them upright. It’s easy to say that Spurrier’s offense didn’t work but it’s not like he put himself in position to win with the talent he surrounded himself with.

There are many current NFL coordinators that fail to attack defenses on a weekly basis and their conservative ways continue to hold their teams back. At the very least, Kelly would have installed an aggressive scheme and introduced some new elements to the pro game.

Would it have worked? We won’t find out any time soon.

In his 14-year NFL career, Kevin Carter handed out plenty of punishment for opposing quarterbacks. He totaled 104.5 career sacks, reached double digit QB-takedowns four times (1998-2000, 2002), and led his team in sacks five times (1996, 1997, 1999, 2004). He also never missed a game in the NFL, which is a testament to his training habits and toughness.

Now that he’s retired, Kevin is helping to promote the website SchoolOfTheLegends.com, which offers fans a chance to interact with not only current players, but legends of the game as well. The site also offers instructional videos from some of the best in the game, which is a great tool for high school athletes or players of any age who want to get tips from the pros. (If you’re a young defensive back, how can you pass up the opportunity to get instructional lessons from Pro Bowler Brian Dawkins?) The site is free to join and in minutes you could be interacting with NFL stars.

Kevin sat down with me recently to discuss not only SchoolOfTheLegends.com, but I was also able to pick his brain about the current lockout mess and get his reaction to the recent comments made by his former Florida coach Steve Spurrier, who says college players should be paid.

The Scores Report: Hey Kevin!

Kevin Carter: Hey there, how are you?

TSR: Very good. You enjoying this ongoing lockout? I know as a fan, I sure am. It’s not nauseating at all.

KC: What a mess.

TSR: Do you think this secret meeting that transpired with the NFL and union officials can be viewed as a positive thing for fans? Are we finally pushing forward here?

KC: I really do, because there’s a certain portion of this fight that needed to be brought to the American public’s attention. There was a lot of posturing on both sides, but really a lot of posturing from the owners. Doing things like securing television revenue money, that even if there’s no season they’re still going to get their money. Doing things like lobbying on Capital Hill to try and influence the lawmakers so a lot of the things like tax laws that they enjoy still remain in place. So there was a portion of it that needed to be fought and brought to the American public’s attention. But ultimately, we’re not going to be able to negotiate through the court systems. At some point we’re going to have to sit down, have a conversation and get down to the brass tacks in order to make a deal for the greater good of the game. Our fans don’t deserve this. They’ve been too great to the sport of football. We’ve been able to grow exponentially; the NFL owners themselves have been able to enjoy a 400% increase in the equity of their business in the last 15-20 years, so the fans have been loyal. They’ve gone through strikes and CBA extensions, and near-scares and whatnot. But this is like nothing else in our history: this is a lockout. Basically the owners are saying, ‘We don’t like the economic structure the way it is set up, even though we’re the ones that have enjoyed this 400% increase in the equity of our business.’ Nobody can say that they’ve enjoyed anything close to that unless you own oil. A certain portion of this fight needed to be done in the courts. But now, with them having a private meeting and talking real numbers, and real dollars, and talking about how we can get this thing out of the courts and people back to work, I’m all for it. I think this is the first real step from a negotiating standpoint that we’ve taken on both sides.

Read the rest of this entry »

Years from now, when people look back on 2010, what will they remember as the defining sports moment? Uh, they can only pick one? We discovered that Tiger Woods likes to play the field and that Brett Favre doesn’t mind sending pictures of his anatomy to hot sideline reporters via text message. We found out that LeBron listens to his friends a little too much and that Ben Roethlisberger needed a serious lesson in humility. But we also learned that athletes such as Michael Vick and Josh Hamilton haven’t blown second chance opportunities (or third and fourth chances in the case of Hamilton). It was also nice to see a certain pitcher turn down bigger money so that he can play in a city that he loves.

Contributors: Anthony Stalter, John Paulsen, Paul Costanzo, Drew Ellis and Mike Farley

Tiger Woods gets around.

We hesitate to put this under “golf” because the only clubs involved were his wife’s nine-iron hitting the window of his SUV and the various establishments where Tiger wined and dined all of his mistresses…over a dozen in all. This was the biggest story of the early part of the year, but it got to the point that whenever a new alleged mistress came forward, the general public was like, “Yeah, we get it. Tiger screwed around on his wife. A lot.” He has spent the rest of the year attempting to rebuild his once-squeaky clean image, but it’s safe to say, we’ll never look at Tiger the same way.

LeBron wilts when his team needs him most.

Say the words “LeBron” and “Game 5” in the same sentence and NBA fans everywhere know exactly what you’re talking about. In the biggest game of the season, LeBron looked disinterested, going 3-of-14 from the field en route to a 120-88 blowout at home at the hands of the Celtics. There were rumors swirling about a possible relationship between LeBron’s mom and his teammate, Delonte West, and there’s speculation that LeBron got that news before tipoff and that’s why he played so poorly. Regardless of the cause, LeBron played awful in that game, and it turned out to be his swan song in Cleveland as a member of the Cavaliers. Talk about leaving a bitter taste.

You can auction off your talented son’s athletic abilities and get away with it.

The NCAA set a strange precedent this season while dealing with the Newton family. The always inconsistent and completely morally uncorrupt NCAA decided in its infinite wisdom that despite discovering that Cecil Newton shopped his son Cam to Mississippi State for $180,000, and that is a violation of NCAA rules, that Cam would still be eligible because it couldn’t be proven that he knew about it. Conference commissioners and athletic directors around the country spoke out about the decision, while agent-wannabes and greedy fathers everywhere had a light bulb go off in their own heads: As long as we say the player doesn’t know about it, it could go off without a hitch. What was Cecil’s punishment in this whole thing? Limited access to Auburn for the last two games of the season. Easy with that hammer there, NCAA. Read the rest of this entry »

According to Game Cocks Online, South Carolina tight end Weslye Saunders has been dismissed from the team

“Weslye Saunders is no longer part of our football program,” said Hyman. “Beyond that I will have no further comment.”

Saunders, a 6-5, 270-pounder from Durham, N.C., had been suspended indefinitely since August 23 following a violation of team rules.

The NCAA is currently investigating whether or not a sports agent had been paying for a hotel room that Saunders had been living in recently. In reference to Saunders’ playing status for South Carolina’s opener, head coach Steve Spurrier said, “He’s not on the team. He won’t play Thursday.”

It appears now that Saunders’ South Carolina career is over and while it’s premature to predict his future in the NFL, his draft stock has surely plummeted over the last couple of weeks.

The NCAA is already looking into the trip tight end Weslye Saunders took this past spring to Miami and whether or not it was agent-funded, now it appears that more South Carolina players could be in trouble.

ESPN.com reports that several South Carolina players, including Saunders, were asked by school officials to move out of a Columbia hotel Thursday evening. The NCAA is now investigating if the players were in violation of any rules by staying at the hotel.

Last week, the NCAA interviewed a number of players about their occupation of the Whitney Hotel, where South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier and other coaches have stayed in the past, The State (Columbia, S.C.) newspaper reported.

Spurrier said Thursday the players have been asked by the school to move out of the hotel, settle their bills and stay elsewhere.

“There’s been some issues,” Spurrier said on his radio call-in show. “We’ve encouraged our guys to move out of the Whitney, to pay their monthly bill and move out . . . Whatever their arrangements were, they need to pay up and move out.”

Spurrier said he knew there were players staying at the Whitney, but did not know of the details, The State reported.

Along with Saunders, the other players who have been linked to the hotel stay are defensive tackle Travian Robertson, defensive tackle Ladi Ajiboye, safety Akeem Auguste and offensive tackle Jarriel King. If the players were staying there on their own dime, there shouldn’t an issue. But if a player agent was picking up the tab, obviously this could become a distraction for Spurrier and the Gamecock program.

Either way, it’s not good that Saunders is being investigated for two different incidents. Just because he’s being investigated doesn’t mean he’s done anything wrong, but this isn’t a good situation regardless.

One of the greatest unsolved crimes in sports history now has a resolution. We can now put our children to bed at night without this shroud of mystery hanging over our heads and breathe a sigh of relief knowing that a major villain has been outed for his crime against humanity.

That’s right, folks: We now know the one person who didn’t vote for Florida’s Tim Tebow as All-SEC quarterback. And it wasn’t that punk Lane Kiffin, nor was it that weasel Bobby Petrino either. Hell, it wasn’t even Nick Saban, who can’t step one foot inside Baton Rouge or Miami without somebody wanting to shove a first down marker where the sun don’t shine.

Nope, it was Steve Spurrier…well, kind of. Apparently it wasn’t actually him, but the director of football operations he had vote for him. Whoops.

Spurrier explained that his director of football operations had filled out the ballot and brought it in to him. Spurrier said he glanced at it, signed off on it, and then realized his mistake much later.

The ballot submitted to the SEC from South Carolina had Mississippi’s Jevan Snead as the first-team quarterback, and not Tebow.

“I take full responsibility,” he said, emphasizing that he believed Tebow to be one of the best quarterbacks in Florida history. “I’m embarrassed about it, I feel badly about it … I apologize to Tim Tebow.”

SEC associate commissioner Charles Bloom confirmed to ESPN.com that Spurrier called within the past 24 hours and asked that his ballot be changed to include Tebow as the first-team quarterback. Spurrier told Bloom that his initial ballot, with Snead as the first-team quarterback, was a mistake.

If you couldn’t tell by the sarcasm I used at start of this article, I don’t think this is a big deal. It’s just a preseason honor and I highly doubt Tebow is losing sleep over this. It’s nice that Spurrier tried to correct the mistake and owns up to it, but again, this is hardly worth getting upset about.

But perhaps an underlying issue (and Pat Forde touched on it in the ESPN article) here, is that these coaches continue to let other people in their programs vote for things like all-conference nominations and even the USA Today Coaches Poll. So you have a director of operations having a stake in which teams could potentially play for a national title, and not the coaches themselves.

This is just reason No. 1,900,340,000 why the BCS system is an absolutely joke. We need a playoff.

By the way, how does Jevan Snead feel right about now? If I’m him I’m like, “A mistake? Gee, thanks Spurrier – tell me how you really feel you son of a bit…”

Lane Kiffin hasn’t even held the Tennessee head-coaching job for three months and already he’s managed to tick off fellow SEC coaches Urban Meyer (Florida), Nick Saban (Alabama), Steve Spurrier (South Carolina) and Mark Richt (Georgia).

That kind of preaching-to-the-choir comment fit perfectly into the rhetoric of his first press conference. I doubt it got much of a rise in Gainesville, since the Gators have owned the Vols in recent seasons.

What really irked Florida Coach Urban Meyer was that Kiffin continued to attempt to hire — unsuccessfully, as it turned out — receivers coach Billy Gonzales while the Gators were preparing for the national championship game.

More recently, Kiffin has gotten on the nerves of Alabama Coach Nick Saban to the extent that Saban is asking players who already have committed to the Crimson Tide not to take official visits to UT.
This is in response to Kiffin’s hiring of Lance Thompson off Saban’s staff. Thompson, considered Alabama’s best recruiter, got a big raise to jump to the Vols just two weeks before signing day.
Considering that UT is a combined 1-6 since Meyer and Saban arrived at Florida and Alabama, you have to take your victories wherever you can find them.

And don’t forget that Kiffin also has tugged on Steve Spurrier’s visor. First Kiffin hired his brother-in-law, David Reaves, off the South Carolina staff. Then Kiffin and Spurrier exchanged comments in the press about recruiting.

While we’re at it, Kiffin also threw a $400,000 offer at super recruiter Rodney Garner in an attempt to lure him off Mark Richt’s staff at Georgia. Garner chose to stay at Georgia.

For those keeping score, Kiffin has kicked sand at Meyer, Saban, Spurrier and Richt. It’s no coincidence that those are the coaches of the four most important opponents on UT’s schedule every year. Those are also four programs that the Vols must match in recruiting if they are to regain relevance in the SEC.

Obviously this is all part of Kiffin’s plan to breathe a little life into a Tennessee program that could use a shot in the arm. Is he going about it the right way? Probably not, although that won’t matter if he wins.

If pissing off your fellow conference coaches motivates the program and players, then go for it. But if nothing changes and the Vols get flattened by all of these teams next year, then Kiffin is just going to look like a pompous ass who got what was coming to him.

SPORTSbyBROOKS.com shares the news that new soon-to-be Tennessee head coach Lane Kiffin is already mixed up in a recruiting scandal involving Steve Spurrier and South Carolina.

Spurrier is claiming that Kiffin’s contact with recruit Jarvis Giles on Sunday violates NCAA rules because Kiffin hadn’t yet passed a required certification test that allows contact with recruits. Giles had pulled out of a verbal commitment to the Vols after Fulmer’s departure was announced, and he was reportedly deciding between Nebraska and…yes, South Carolina.

Kiffin’s contact with Giles on Sunday is clear. What’s not clear is whether or not Kiffin was technically UT’s coach at the time and whether NCAA rules allowed such a phone call. GO VOLS XTRA’s Dave Hooker had a seemingly harmless story about Giles’ conversation with Kiffin on Sunday:

“He already called me this morning at 7 o’clock,” the 6-foot, 175-pound tailback from Gaither High School in Tampa, Fla., said Sunday afternoon. “He said ‘I sat down and watched a little bit of your film online. From what I’ve seen, you’re pretty impressive.’

“He said he was going to sit down and watch some more tonight and see how I can fit into this offense.”

Spurrier saw these comments and wondered how exactly Kiffin had signed a contract and become certified to contact recruits in such a short period of time. THE STATE of Columbia, S.C., reports that it all happened awfully fast. Spurrier of course didn’t resist the opportunity to get in a verbal jab:

“You’re supposed to have passed the NCAA test and be on board, I think. But maybe he was just calling him as an interested observer,” Spurrier said today, laughing. “I don’t know. But technically to be able to recruit you’re supposed to pass the NCAA test.

“I know when I was hired, after the press conference I took the test to qualify you to be a recruiter. I hadn’t taken it in three or four years. At that time I could start making calls. I don’t know if he was permitted to make that call or not. You’ll have to ask somebody else.”

Kiffin said today during his first press conference that he had taken the test in time. A UT spokesman told THE STATE that Kiffin signed his contract on Saturday (which is a little odd, since Fulmer was still coaching the Vols that day while they played Kentucky).

Further muddying the Giles situation is the fact that David Reaves, the recruiting coordinator at South Carolina since 2006 (in addition to duties as quarterbacks coach), just resigned from his post with the Gamecocks…to join Kiffin’s staff. It just so happens that Reaves is Kiffin’s brother-in-law. In his old job, Reaves was likely heavily involved in efforts to get Giles to Columbia.

Welcome back to the wonderful world of college football, Lane.

Top 25 vs. Top 25
No. 25 South Carolina at. No. 4 Florida, 3:30 PM ET CBS
After they were shocked by Ole’ Miss and turned in a lackluster performance in a win over Arkansas, the Gators trounced LSU, Kentucky, Georgia and Vanderbilt in convincing fashion. Nothing against the three teams ranked higher, but Florida might be the best team in college football right now. Tim Tebow has resurrected his Heisman candidacy after rushing for five touchdowns and accounting for 424 total yards in the Gators’ 51-31 win over the Gamecocks last year. But Steve Spurrier’s squad has been one of the hottest teams in the nation over the past couple of weeks. The rotation of Stephen Garcia and Chris Smelley at quarterback has lifted South Carolina and the defense has played inspired. This is a better matchup than most think, although it’s highly possibly that Florida could roll with how well they’ve played over the past month. Expect the Gators to use this as another statement game leading up to their huge battle with Alabama in the SEC Championship Game December 6.

Upset Watch:
No. 16 North Carolina at Maryland, 3:30 PM ET ABC
The Terps have clearly been a different team at home than on the road where they’re 4-0 and averaging 25.5 points per game as opposed to 1-3 and 11.75 PPG on the road. Maryland has also won five straight against ranked opponents the past two years and still control their own destiny in the ACC Atlantic. Three wins in their final three games would send the Terps to the ACC title game, which is amazing considering this was the same team that got drubbed 31-0 by Virginia. If Maryland is going to pull off the upset they’ll need to get Da’Rel Scott and Davin Meggett going in the running game because putting the ball in the air against the Tar Heels is a risky proposition. UNC has one of the best ball hawking defenses in the nation and has forced opponents into mistakes all season. If the Terps play things close to the vest offensively and rely on their defense to win the game, an upset could be in the making.

Other notable games:
Mississippi State at No. 1 Alabama, 7:45 PM ET
It’s highly unlikely the Tide lose focus against a 3-6 Mississippi State team, but the Bulldogs did pull off one of the better upsets of the year when they crushed previously No. 13 Vanderbilt 34-3.

No. 3 Texas at Kansas, 12:30 PM ET
The Longhorns try to keep in the national title hunt while the Jayhawks look to end the season as quickly as possible.

No. 10 Georgia at Auburn, 12:30 PM ET
This is one of the more underrated rivalries in the SEC.