Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
Digg
Tell us what you think!Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.
Am I the only person who has figured out Lane Kiffin is a conniving weasel? The man has been surrounded by controversy ever since he established himself in the football world, and that is the case once again.
The University of Tennessee football team has had at least six secondary NCAA violations since Kiffin took over as its head coach. It has barely been a full calendar year since he was hired.
The latest accusations are that the Volunteers sent “hostesses” to high school football games in order to lure recruits to commit to Tennessee. According to a report from Marcus Lattimore, a target of the hostesses, the girls were “real pretty, real nice and just real cool … I haven’t seen other schools do that. It’s crazy.”
But this investigation merely scratches the surface of Kiffin’s ongoing list of antics. In 2007, at age 31, Kiffin became the youngest head coach in NFL history when he took the reigns of the Oakland Raiders. After one season, his rocky relationship with owner Al Davis became public knowledge.
First it was reported Davis had drafted a letter of resignation for Kiffin, but Kiffin refused to sign it. Davis later fired Kiffin over the telephone, four weeks into his second season as an NFL head coach. At the news conference announcing the firing, Davis referred to Kiffin as a “flat-out liar” and remarked that he was guilty of “bringing disgrace to the organization.”
I would be remiss to not acknowledge that Davis has also been the focus of much scrutiny since he has been an NFL owner. If Kiffin had not continued to bring questions upon himself, I may have let him off the hook for his soap opera with the Raiders.
On Dec. 1, 2008, Kiffin was announced as the head coach for the University of Tennessee. Two months later, at a breakfast full of his program’s boosters, Kiffin publicly called out University of Florida head coach Urban Meyer for recruiting violations.
Kiffin stated one of his recruits was bombarded with phone calls from Meyer while he was visiting UT’s campus. “Just so you know, you can’t call a recruit on another campus. But I love the fact that Urban had to cheat and still didn’t get him,” Kiffin said. No big deal, right? Wrong. There was nothing illegal about what Meyer did and, ironically enough, Kiffin was violating SEC rules by making the allegations.
I’m not going to get into his degrading remarks about one of the high schools he visited while recruiting one player. Or the cheap shot he took at the University of South Carolina, telling a player that if he became a Gamecock, he would end up pumping gas like everyone else who goes there. The list of arrogant, classless acts that Kiffin has committed goes on and on.
It’s only a matter of time before Kiffin’s luck runs out and he ends up pumping gas for a living.
Bangor Daily News