Only Les Miles could get called for delay of game on a fourth-and-nine, then call a timeout.
And only Les Miles could get bailed out by the other team having 12 men on the field on the final play.
LSU survived at home against a pitiful Tennessee team today, remaining one of the more unimpressive undefeated teams in the country. The Tigers won 16-14 and scored from a yard out as time expired after a Tennessee penalty gave them second life.
Had LSU lost this game, I’m assuming the LSU faithful would have forcibly removed Miles from his position. I understand that winning in the SEC is a tough thing to do each week. And I understand that a lot of teams get lucky in their wins. But Les Miles is setting records for luck and incompetence all at the same time. Yet he still has a job and still is pulling in good recruiting classes.
LSU has four losses left on its schedule, but will 8-4 be enough to get rid of Miles? Or even worse, if he lucks his way into a couple of wins against Florida, Auburn, Alabama or Arkansas, do they extend his contract? He might be the only many lucky enough to fall into that situation.
Under the direction of Mike Stoops, Arizona has won some very big games. The Wildcats knocked off a top 10 team three years in a row from 2005-07, with UCLA, California and Oregon all being their victims. This past year, Arizona even knocked off the Pac 10′s Goliath in USC.
But those wins all came late in the season, when Arizona had already piled up a handful of losses. One thing the Wildcats — who seem to perennially be thought of as a sleeper team — have not done, is capitalize on any preseason hype with a big-time early-season win.
They have the chance to do that tonight, though, when they play host to No. 9 Iowa. A win moves the Wildcats to 3-0 and gives them some serious national respect. It would also be a huge victory for the Pac 10, which is trying to assert itself as a top conference, even with a lethargic, and penalized, USC.
Can Stoops and Arizona pull it off? Click through for that prediction, and more from today’s games. Read the rest of this entry »
This video was taken before Lane Kiffin sat down to speak to the Knoxville media about his decision to leave Tennessee to take the USC job. One television reporter (or producer?) doesn’t want to agree to Kiffin’s terms. It’s pretty funny to watch thirty people trip over each other trying to get a stupid press conference started.
What better way to show that you’re angry at the head coach that left your team high and dry then to burn a mattress?
I’ve always wanted to see the expression on the guy’s face that volunteered to burn his mattress when he woke up the next morning and didn’t have a bed anymore.
“Troy…Troy!”
“What?”
“What the hell happened to my bed man? It’s gone!”
“Dude, you burned it in the protest last night. Don’t you remember?”
“F**k no I don’t remember! What the hell, man!”
“Yeah, you wanted to do it to protest Lane Kiffin’s departure.”
According to a report by ESPN.com, Tennessee is under investigation for using recruiting “hostesses” to help lure high school football prospects to come to the university.
The NCAA appears to be strongly interested in Tennessee’s use of hostesses — students who are part of a university group that hosts prospective students on campus visits, including athletes. It was not clear whether the university sent the hostesses to visit the football players, the newspaper reported.
In one case, hostesses traveled nearly 200 miles to attend a football game at James F. Byrnes High School in Duncan, S.C., one of the nation’s best high school football programs, where at least three potential Tennessee recruits were playing, according to the report.
Two of Lattimore’s high school teammates, Brandon Willis and Corey Miller, have orally committed to Tennessee. Lattimore said the hostesses were “real pretty, real nice and just real cool” and thinks they had “a lot” of influence in his teammates making oral commitments, according to the report.
“I haven’t seen no other schools do that,” Lattimore said, according to the report. “It’s crazy.”
According to the article, Tennessee has committed at least six secondary NCAA violations since Lane Kiffin took over as head coach.
It might be hard to gather evidence in this situation outside of talking to the young recruits, but considering Tennessee has committed six violations one would assume that the NCAA is going to take their time investigating these “hostess” allegations.
Tennessee men’s basketball coach Bruce Pearl is in some hot water after making an inappropriate joke at a recent speaking engagement.
Tennessee men’s basketball coach Bruce Pearl is apologizing for an off-the-cuff joke he made about a rural area of the state at a charity fundraiser Thursday, calling it “inappropriate.”
Pearl, speaking without notes, was addressing Tennessee Valley Authority employees about the challenges he and his staff face in getting players from diverse backgrounds to play as a team.
“I’ve got a tough job. I’ve got to put these guys from different worlds together, right?’ Pearl said. “I’ve got guys from Chicago, Detroit … I’m talking about the ‘hood! And I’ve got guys from Grainger County, where they wear the hood.”
Ouch. Making light of the KKK is not only offensive to the (non-racist) folks of Grainger County, but it’s also offensive to the black community.
He’s a successful coach, but I’ve never been a big fan of Pearl’s style and it dates back to 1995, when I was in college at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. My team won the D3 National Championship that year and the following season we traveled up to Fairbanks, Alaska, to play in the Tournament of Champions, which included the D2, NAIA and D3 champions from the previous season.
We were non-scholarship, so after we “upset” the host team, Alaska-Fairbanks, in the first round, we played Pearl’s D2 Southern Indiana team in the tourney championship. They jumped out to a 20-plus point lead, but after we went on a run in the second half to cut into the lead, he yelled on the sideline — “Do I have to call a timeout? Do I really have to call a timeout?”
I remember thinking: Is this guy for real? His all-scholarship team was playing our non-scholarship D3 school and he’s over there mocking us on the sideline to make a point to his team?
Since then, I’ve always thought that Pearl was a loudmouth who didn’t often think before he spoke, and he’s done nothing to disprove that notion in his tenure at Tennessee.
According to a report by ESPN.com, Tennessee quarterback Jonathan Crompton received death threats last season in the wake of the Volunteers losing seven games for only the second time in the program’s history.
Crompton received at least two e-mailed death threats during his junior season, the player told the Knoxville News Sentinel.
The problem was brought to his parents’ attention after a package they received had slanderous messages scrawled on the box.
“That’s when my parents started talking about it,” Crompton said, according to the newspaper.
Crompton said he never reported the threats to the school.
He also stayed quiet when he began to receive harassing phone calls after his cell number was made public on the Internet.
“It was tough, I’m not going to lie,” he said. “When you’re faced with adversity, your true character comes out — as a person, as a student, as a Christian.
“It tested me.”
People seem to lose the sense of reality when it comes to sports sometimes. Crompton is only 21 years old – he’s still a kid. He’s a student athlete trying not only to succeed at sports, but also in the classroom so that he can excel in a career field when he’s done playing football. He doesn’t deserve to have his life threatened because of what he does or doesn’t do on the field – no one does.
I know we’re talking about Tennessee football here, but relax people – it’s just a game.
Apparently Tennessee head coach Lane Kiffin wasn’t too pleased with Alshon Jeffrey’s (one of the nation’s best high school wide receivers) decision to play for South Carolina next year, and told him so.
According to Jeffrey and Wilson, Kiffin told Jeffrey that if he chose the Gamecocks, he would end up pumping gas for the rest of his life like all the other players from that state who had gone to South Carolina.
Jeffrey was doing his best to stay awake at that point, but that comment from Kiffin woke him up. He clearly hasn’t forgotten it, either.
“He said it, but it’s not worth talking about,” Jeffrey said.
Wilson was a little more diplomatic. He wrote it off as Kiffin pulling out all of the stops and simply not wanting to concede defeat. Wilson acknowledged that’s about as negative as it got that morning.
“It was his last resort. That’s all it was,” said Wilson, who also attended high school in South Carolina.
“When you get pushed against the wall and your back is there, you’re going to come out with something. You should have heard coach Carroll. He was wide awake at 3 o’clock in the morning. Remember, he was on West Coast time and fighting to get Alshon to the very end.
“But the war was over at that point.”
I’m sure college recruiters have said much worse to recruits, but Kiffin’s act is starting to wear a little thin. He’s already pissed off several of the SEC coaches and now he’s not endearing himself to future prospects. Maybe he should relax a little and win a few games at Tennessee before pissing everyone off.
“I made the decision last weekend and I went back and forth,” Kiffin said. “It was a very, very hard decision because of players, our fans. When you’ve been in a place since 1996, you don’t just jump ship. I’ve had other opportunities. There was one that came up last year that was a great opportunity and people don’t even know for sure about the whole thing. But I stayed here, decided to sign back up for two years. But the club was very good about giving me the option to go with my son.”
Lane Kiffin recently took the job as head coach at Tennessee, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity for he and his father to do something they’ve talked about for years: work together.
“It boiled down to one thing: It was your son, and that’s what it is,” Kiffin said. “I love these players. I addressed it Wednesday. I told (General Manager) Bruce (Allen). Jon (Gruden) was the first person I told. The head coach, he should know first. I told the defensive staff before I went downstairs at a quarter ’til 4. We had a team meeting at 4 o’clock and the whole team was there.
“I told them kind of what I’m telling you. I said, “Guys, this was a tough decision. I went back and forth. I said I just want you to know now. I didn’t think it was right to keep carrying it out.”
Huge, massive, enormous blow for the Buccaneers. Monte Kiffin has consistently been one of the best defensive coordinators in the NFL this decade and the teams in the NFC South must be celebrating after hearing this news.
Kiffin, 33, will be making his college head coaching debut in succeeding Phillip Fulmer, who will coach his last game for the Vols on Saturday.
Tennessee athletic director Mike Hamilton denied reports on Wednesday that Kiffin had been offered a contract. But Kiffin has been at the forefront of the Vols’ search for some time.
Part of the holdup is that Tennessee didn’t want to do anything officially this week that would take away from Fulmer’s final game Saturday against Kentucky. Fulmer was fired by Hamilton on Nov. 2 and allowed to finish out the season. He’s been at Tennessee as a player, assistant coach and head coach for 35 years.
The university has dubbed Saturday’s game “Phillip Fulmer Appreciation Day” at Neyland Stadium in celebration of his 17-year tenure.
One of the big draws with Kiffin was the staff that he’ll potentially be able to put together. He’s talked with his father, Tampa Bay Buccaneers defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin, about joining him at Tennessee. The elder Kiffin is considered one of the foremost defensive minds in football.
Outside of drawing recruits with his NFL resume, I’m not sure Kiffin is a great fit at Tennessee. But the Vols are in major need of an offensive facelift, which is supposed to be (read: supposed to be) Kiffin’s specialty.
How huge would it be if Lane could convince papa Monte to come up from Tampa and join him? Monte Kiffin’s defenses are always so underrated and he’s easily one of the best schemers in the NFL. It’s doubtful he would leave the Bucs, but one would have to imagine that the temptation to join his son would be strong.
