Lane Kiffin, Welcome To The SEC You Big Cheater!

If you think it’s hard to win football games in the South Eastern Conference you should try being the new kid on the block in the conference’s coaching fraternity. Shortly after being introduced at the Tennessee Volunteers new head coach Kiffin was chastised by South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier for possible recruiting violations.

The NCAA requires coaches to take a recruiting certification test before they’re allowed to contact recruits and Spurrier assumed that Kiffin had violated the rule when he contacted running back recruit Jarvis Giles before he was introduced as the Vols new coach. Spurrier didn’t retake the test until after he had been introduced at S.C. and I guess he thought that was the norm for coaches and piped that perhaps Kiffin had contacted the recruit as, “an interested observer.”

However, it would be Kiffin who got the last word in on Spurrier letting him know that he isn’t as slow as the Ol’ Ball Coach thinks. “As far as recruiting, we’ve hit the ground running. I took the test a few days before I got hired here so that we could do that,” he said Monday at his introductory news conference.
I think he’ll fit in just fine!

Big Phil Out At Tennessee

Phil Fulmer is being forced out as the Tennessee Volunteers head football coach 10 years after winning a national championship. Fulmer has a 150-51 record in his 17 years as the Vols head coach and led Tennessee to the SEC Championship Game last season.

Tennessee fans have been frustrated with Fulmer for several years now but the coach has seemed to do just enough to get by and survive to the next season. That won’t be the case this year at the Volunteers currently stand at 3-6 (1-5 in SEC games) and are just one more loss away from guaranteeing a losing season and missing a bowl game for the second time in four years. That hasn’t happened in Knoxville since Tennessee missed bowl games in 1975-1978 seasons.

Fulmer seems like a likable guy and his record shows that he knows a thing or two about coaching college football. Things have just become stale for some reason at Tennessee. Maybe it is due to the rise to power of other SEC schools or perhaps it was some recruiting risks that Fulmer took in recent years on kids who had the type of character you wouldn’t otherwise find in Knoxville. Whatever the reason, it was evident that this was the time for a change.