News Article: A few topics as summer arrives

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A few topics as summer arrives
By Jess Nicholas
TideFans Editor-in-Chief
May 22, 2009

As summer arrives, a football fan’s own personal purgatory – that vast nothingness between spring football and the onset of fall camp – rears its ugly head.

For the next three months, the sports world will revolve around NASCAR, PGA golf and the completion of playoffs from a NBA season that began sometime in 1987.

Here are a few topics to kick around as the summer doldrums kick back:

· Parity may be the rule in college football these days but the SEC appears to be as separated into haves and have-nots as it has been in some time. Only two teams look to have any shot of contending in the SEC East, Florida and Georgia – and even Georgia is a stretch. Steve Spurrier continues to beat his head against the wall at South Carolina and could very well sneak past Georgia into second place this season, but the Gamecocks aren’t in Florida’s atmosphere. Meanwhile, over in the West, it looks to be an LSU-Alabama showdown with Ole Miss trying to push its way into the picture. Assuming the Rebels have trouble replacing Michael Oher, Mike Wallace and the heart of its secondary, the SEC could break down into two two-team races.

· Speaking of have-nots, next year isn’t going to be a fun year to be a Mississippi State Bulldog, if most analysts are correct. Despite new head coach Dan Mullen’s readiness to craft an offense to suit his talent – particularly I-back Anthony Dixon – Mullen is a spread-option devotee and this offense was originally recruited to run the West Coast. We’ll see how that works.

· Having said that, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks Mississippi State didn’t make the best offseason coaching hire, given the results of the Auburn and Tennessee coaching searches. MSU winds up with the co-designer of an offense that won two national championships at Florida, while Auburn ended up with hotseat regular Gene Chizik and Tennessee got Lane Kiffin. More on both in a bit.

· One of the saddest realities in college football is that Rich Brooks will never have top-line talent at Kentucky, thus he’ll never get to show what he can do on a truly big stage. Given that the Wildcats consistently finish 10th or 11th in conference recruiting, but Brooks has turned UK into a perennial bowl contender anyway, should tell you something about his abilities. The man who built Oregon into the power Mike Bellotti inherited is a top-five coach in the SEC and that’s an accomplishment.

· Houston Nutt will either take the next step as a head coach or he will prove his detractors correct about his ability to be a front-line coach. Nutt is always better as the underdog than as a front-runner, and Ole Miss is being picked in a lot of people’s top 10s this year. When he was at Arkansas, Nutt had the maddening ability to turn such lofty expectations into 6-6 or 7-5 seasons. What will he do at Ole Miss with arguably the most talented team he’s ever had? Hard to say, but he already repeated one of his Arkansas habits by underachieving on the recruiting trail last year. Smart money is on Ole Miss duplicating last season’s record but not taking much of a step forward.

· Just a note on Gene Chizik: He looks just like the actor playing the umpire in the Barbasol commercials.

· If you want to have a fun “what if?” scenario on your hands, try to guess who will be the next Florida coach if Urban Meyer goes to Notre Dame or the NFL. While most people who have a bet on that race are currently on the Charlie Weis Pink Slip Watch, don’t discount that Meyer might try to take the spread-option to the NFL and prove it can work there just because he can. Regardless, who would replace him at UF if he left? Dan Mullen perhaps, if he turns MSU around quickly. Bob Stoops? His postseason record gives some people pause. Otherwise, look for it to be someone with professional experience and the line of interested people would be out the door and around the building.

· The SEC television contract with ESPN should forever end the discussion of which conference in America is the true power conference. The unfortunate thing is, it’s such a powerful conference – and about to be so flush with money – that this could be one of those transitional points where either the NCAA tries to muscle in, or the conference evolves into a collection of teams that can’t win a championship. It’s already rare for a SEC team to go undefeated through the regular season, and the resources that will develop from this TV deal will only bring the floor up. Now the question is whether the SEC will lead the charge for a playoff. It’s interesting that the conference with arguably the richest bowl history in the land may be the one that decides it’s time to play playoff football.

· The NCAA investigation into USC is interesting on several fronts, not the least of which is what a major penalty could do to the landscape of college football, both on the West Coast and in other areas. Specifically, Texas, Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama are the current “next level” behind USC as recruiting powers, with Texas probably at the front of that line. LSU, Georgia and Ohio State are also contenders. If USC receives major penalties, logic would dictate the Trojans would, at least for a time, no longer be the ultimate go-to school for recruits. Looking for a team from that second group to step up? It’s hard to overlook Alabama and its back-to-back recruiting national championships.

· On a related note, as of Thursday, May 21, Alabama still did not have word on its penalties from the NCAA. From now until Alabama does receive word, which will be somewhere in the next 14 days in all likelihood, get ready for various message board “insider” posts declaring that they know what the penalties over Textbookgate are going to be. The truth is that no one knows right now and everything you may have heard over the last few days is just rumor.

· And to close, I’m going to break from what has become a mantra of mine, one that says roughly, “thou shalt not feed the attention hounds.”

Tennessee head coach Lane Kiffin has done an excellent job of creating press for himself since arriving at Tennessee. Unfortunately, he’s done it by breaking NCAA rules and making a general laughingstock out of himself in the press by resorting to high school braggadocio in regards to the Tennessee program and where it’s headed.

He’s apparently brushed off policing efforts from the SEC office to control his speech, because this week he added to his list of gaffes by responding to a reporter’s question of player attrition by bringing Nick Saban’s name into the conversation and then making another in a long line of ignorant statements.

When asked about high attrition at Tennessee since his arrival, Kiffin said the number of players Tennessee has lost – 11, all since January – were fewer than what Alabama lost during the same time frame under Saban. Apparently Kiffin is about as good with basic math as he is in controlling his mouth. Alabama had lost four players in that time frame, one of them to a career-ending injury. It took Saban a full year to approach Kiffin’s attrition levels, with four more players suffering either career-ending injuries or failing a physical and not being cleared to play.

Ordinarily, the rule of thumb in these situations is to let the offender continue to spout off and not address it, but apparently Kiffin isn’t going to learn his lesson until someone teaches it to him. That is likely to happen this fall, when Urban Meyer, Nick Saban and as many as a half-dozen other coaches bring fully-staffed football teams in to face a Tennessee team that right now is a general mess.

Making Al Davis look like a visionary in the 21st Century is quite an accomplishment, but that’s what it appears the ancient Oakland Raiders’ owner did for himself last year when he figured out what kind of trainwreck he had on his hands, and terminated Kiffin’s contract.

And while there’s little doubt the charismatic Kiffin will do better on the recruiting trail than the stale Phil Fulmer had done in recent years, the operative question is whether Kiffin will be around to coach his first recruiting class to graduation, or whether Tennessee Athletic Director Mike Hamilton stages his own genius moment when he realizes he very likely hired a glorified recruiter and quality control coach from a successful college program (USC) who has gotten where he is thus far based mostly on self-promotion and a famous last name.

Furthermore, if Kiffin is going to make Alabama a target of his barbs, he should consider this: At one time, the Alabama-Tennessee rivalry was among the most heated, but also the most respectful rivalries in college football. Many older Alabama fans don’t just respect, they absolutely revere Gen. Robert Neyland and what he accomplished in Knoxville.

We can argue about where this rivalry started to go south (no pun intended), but it went completely off the cliff in the late 1990s and reached its nadir with Alabama’s probation in 2002 – a probation that came about, to a great extent, with the help of UT-friendly interests who were monitoring Alabama’s recruiting, to say nothing of a SEC office led by Roy Kramer, whose coziness with Tennessee administrators and coaches is all too fresh on Alabama fans’ minds.

If Tennessee is interested in returning to the days of Neyland and Bryant, Battle and Majors and Stallings and games that were memorable not for the politics off the field but the accomplishments on it, someone will snatch Kiffin up by the ear and have an old-fashioned country Sunday meeting with him around the backyard fence about his place in the game relative to the tradition of the two schools. The same can be said of his zingers directed at Florida and other SEC programs. One can only poke a tiger with a sharp stick for so long before the tiger has had enough.

It may sound trite to say it this way – but it is no less disturbing given the fact it is necessary – Tennessee’s coach simply needs to grow up. And then he needs to clam up.