I have said these exact same things on this board. The sheep disagree though.
By Gregg Doyel
CBSSports.com National Columnist
You can do what new Tennessee football coach Lane Kiffin did a few days ago, and it would fine by me. You can steal a recruit from Florida, rub it in at a booster meeting, then mock Florida's Urban Meyer for getting beaten for the player despite cheating.
You can do all those things and be in the clear -- as long as you satisfy one condition:
Be right.
That's all. Just get your facts straight. Truth is a defense here. Call out another coach for cheating, even after stealing one of his recruits, and you're serving the greater good. Cheaters suck. Call them out. Every time.
Just be right about it.
Kiffin got it wrong when he gloated about stealing Florida commitment Nu'Keese Richardson, noting Meyer had called Richardson's cell phone while the kid was visiting Tennessee. "Just so you know," Kiffin told the crowd, "you can't call a recruit (when he's) on another campus. I love the fact that Urban had to cheat and still didn't get him."
The crowd roared, because that's what large groups of stupid people do when given the chance. They roar. And they were wrong, because Kiffin was wrong. Meyer didn't "cheat." The rule Kiffin cited? It doesn't exist. The SEC reprimanded Kiffin for being a buffoon, and Kiffin issued a lame apology that began: "If I offended ..."
If you offended?
Bad accusation. Bad apology. Big shock? Nope. Kiffin's a dope. Tennessee hasn't gotten the memo yet, but it will. The SEC doesn't lie. Coach a few years in that league, and you are what you are. If you're a great coach, you'll win games and maybe even a conference or national championship. If you're an average coach, you'll hang around a few years before getting the boot. And if you're an idiot, well, you're screwed.
Kiffin's screwed. This episode proves it. Because you don't tattletale on another coach for cheating, and do it in a setting as public as a gathering of almost 1,000 boosters, unless you're right. And unless you know you're right. A great coach definitely would know if he's right. An average coach probably would know. An idiot coach? He doesn't even know how he got his job in the first place. That's Kiffin. He literally doesn't understand why he is who he is.
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.
Who's the right guy? The right guy, frankly, would have been someone like Urban Meyer. Someone who won a lot of games at Bowling Green, then put up a perfect season at Utah, and then after all that scratching and clawing got the job at Florida ... where he won two national championships in his first four years. Only a man like Meyer, a self-made man -- a winner -- has the bearing to pull off what Kiffin was trying to pull off.
Kiffin is so anti-Urban, he should answer to "Rural."
Rural 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.
And he's already falling.
This is the first in what will be a series of public embarrassments for Kiffin. He's in over his head, and he's not smart enough to know it. A smarter man would understand where he came from and how he got where he was and lay low, out of the public eye. He wouldn't draw too much attention, because when you live in a glass house like Kiffin and start throwing stones, you end up with rocks in your kitchen.
A sharper coach, one with a better feel for himself and his business, wouldn't go out of his way to tick off the one guy in the SEC who has the players, the style and the cruelty to get even on the field. Meyer is all of those things, including cruel, and I'm not ripping him for it. Want to win at the highest level in college football? Then you better have some killer instinct. Meyer has it. The entire Georgia sideline celebrated a touchdown against Florida in 2007 by running onto the field, and Meyer retaliated one year later by winning 49-10 and calling two late timeouts to rub it in.
Urban Meyer can be cruel, but in a league as brutal as the SEC, nice guys finish last. So do dumb guys, and Rural Kiffin's first major move as the head coach at Tennessee was stupid.
