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Lane Kiffinhasbeen hired at Tennessee. What do you think about it?
[url]http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/28/ SPKD14E28U.DTL[/url]
(11-28) 19:00 PST -- Lane Kiffin's 22-month tour of Al Davis' circle of hell was finally completed this weekend when he agreed to an extended contract to be the new head coach at the University of Tennessee.
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This tells us two things: One, there may be hope for Tom Cable after all; and two, Kiffin played Davis with greater facility than even Jon Gruden ever did.
As for the first, we are being half-facetious, as Cable is still on the outer rim of interim. For the second, we are dead serious. Kiffin knew as quickly as did Davis that the two were fated to loathe each other, and yet without Davis, Kiffin could never have made the jump from his modest place in the USC coaching hierarchy to the Tennessee job.
In other words, he rolled the dice with his reputation, and came up not with just a seven, but with a Yahtzee.
The announcement is being delayed until after Phillip Fulmer's sendoff game against Kentucky today, but multiple sources have not only pegged the deal as done, but have verified that he will be paid more to coach the Volunteers than he was to coach the Raiders - and maybe even more than his grievance against Al for money still owed on the balance of his contract.
Whether Kiffin can succeed in air more rarefied than the sludge of the AFC West (trust us, far more people care about the Southeastern Conference) remains to be seen. The company around him is world-class fast - Nick Saban at Alabama, Urban Meyer at Florida, Mark Richt at Georgia, even Houston Nutt at Mississippi - and what he has proven as a head coach is mostly that he could irritate the boss.
True, irritating Al could be a noble pursuit in and of itself, but its amusements last only so long. Kiffin's war with Davis lasted only 20 games, but by the end even the truest believers on either side had seen the catastrophic flaws in both men, and by the end we were treated to notions like a 76-yard field goal attempt that wasn't about three points but a finger in the eye. The players did not weep when Kiffin left, except with envy. He had the leverage of pushing Davis' hypersensitive buttons, and an ability to sell himself without a resume.
And that salesmanship has now worked twice. He got a job in the NFL his experience didn't merit, and now he has one in the SEC that his NFL experience didn't merit, either.
Except that Tennessee fans are actually less forgiving than Raider fans, and he won't have a natural and target-rich foil like Al to play off this time. He will either build an SEC powerhouse in the teeth of more experienced men like Saban and Meyer and Richt and yes, even Nutt, or he will be run out of Knoxville with a vengeance that makes Al's overhead projector seem like a French tickler.
See, Kiffin was playing with all the face cards in Oakland, a fact we didn't really see at the time when we thought he was trying to succeed in Oakland. He had a limited and dispirited roster, an owner whose last calendar purchase was in 1977, and his own boyish charm. He knew he would always have Al, and Al makes all things shine in comparison. All credit to Lane for deducing it long before the rest of us.
But in taking the Tennessee job rather than, say, Washington or Syracuse or even Clemson, he decided, as young'uns often will, to fly too close to the sun. The SEC is not for the faint of heart, or the superficially clever, or even the young and energetic. The SEC is where you go after you've cut your teeth on something tougher than Davis' disapproval, and unless Kiffin has a lot more game than he ever showed in Oakland, he's picked an awfully big elephant to ride.
He is following an unpopular coach in Fulmer, but also one who lasted 17 years and won a national championship; in Oakland, he followed Norv Turner. His stadium will have 107,000 fans in it each week, while the Raiders fight hard to get to 60,000. There are no shades of gray in Tennessee football, where every win is the minimum standard and every loss an affront to an entire state. In Oakland, the fans have been beaten down well enough to feel good about beating Kansas City.
In sum, Lane Kiffin got the promotion he'd been working nearly two years to get. Now we're about to find out if he was really up to it all this time.
