Kiffin watch: the legend of Junior

Quite an amazing article on Lane Kiffin in Sports Illustrated.  Here’s a taste of what you’ll find:

1.  The reason he took the Raiders job was to polish his resume.

… Before his time in Oakland, where he produced a 5–15 record, Kiffin had coordinated Pete Carroll’s offense and recruiting program at USC, and he’d always planned to return to college football. Even as a high school quarterback in Bloomington, Minn., where he called his own plays, and later as a seldom-used backup at Fresno State, where he surrendered his last year of eligibility to help coach the offense, Kiffin had dreamed of leading a big-time college program. Davis might or might not have succeeded in raising questions about Kiffin’s character, but hiring him in the first place allowed him to include head coaching experience on his résumé, a prerequisite at some schools.

“Lane took that job because, as he told me, it’s hard to get a good college job unless you’ve been a head coach somewhere,” says Monte. “He’d been spoiled at Southern Cal, and the only job he wanted was a head job at a big school. He didn’t have any interest in working his way up at small schools.”

2.  Addition by subtraction.

… Only a few weeks after accepting the job, Kiffin was already crowing about the coaches he’d stolen from rival schools in the Southeastern Conference. He called it addition by subtraction. “I could’ve gone to places like Oregon and Michigan and found great coaches to hire, but that’s only addition to us,” he explains. “By finding them at SEC schools and taking them away, that’s addition by subtraction.”

“I have to play Alabama every year,” Kiffin says. “I basically stole their best guy. I have to play South Carolina. I took their best guy. I took Mississippi State’s. Ed Orgeron was going to be LSU’s recruiting coordinator. I went and got him. I also got Eddie Gran—he’s the coach who recruited players like Cadillac Williams and Ronnie Brown for Auburn. I like to joke that we’d have the best recruiting class in the country right now if I’d spent as much time recruiting players as I’ve spent recruiting coaches.”

3.  Junior is underpaid.  By a lot.  By choice.

… Kiffin is making $2 million a year, a salary that ranks him seventh or eighth among the 12 SEC head coaches, says Mike Hamilton, Tennessee’s men’s athletic director. Kiffin might’ve negotiated a wage closer to the $4 million that Nick Saban earns at Alabama or the $3.65 million that Meyer made last year at Florida, but he agreed to accept less if the university budgeted more to pay for his assistants.

I’m getting tired of posting about the guy, but it’s impossible not to react viscerally to crap like this.

And if Mike Hamilton went into the job negotiation truly believing that Junior was worth $3-4 million a year, he’s the most incompetent AD in the country.

I do like finding out whom Layla Kiffin was named after, though.

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Silver lining time

If you thought nothing good would come from the financial crisis, guess again.

Is Bobby Lowder too big to fail? The same week that the Montgomery banker was announced as one of Alabama’s most influential men, the federal government and Colonial Bank shareholders have selected him as one the nation’s worst bankers.

The situation at Colonial is so bad, some say, that it may be destined to be seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or sold to a more stable banking institution.

Stock prices fell so low on Wednesday that I considered buying a few thousand shares.

My bride quickly vetoed that notion. But at 78 cents a share it looked tempting. And before the final bell Wednesday, it had started a recovery, closing at 85 cents.

Folks started unloading that stock as fast as wet rats jumping from a sinking ship. Some 25 million shares were sold and Lowder’s personal portfolio (he has about 7.7 million shares) shrank from a value of more than $200 million to around $6.5 million.

Too bad, so sad.  Maybe Lowder should have diversified into something more shock-proof, like wholesale liquor distribution.  As it is, perhaps his loss will be Auburn’s gain.

(h/t The Joe Cribbs Car Wash)

Elections have consequences.

You know, I wondered at the time how Les Miles’ flirtation with Ed Orgeron and that $600K salary offer were going to play out with this guy:

… Josh Henson is LSU’s recruiting coordinator and tight ends coach. Henson has helped put together a recruiting class for 2009 that is No. 1 in the nation, according to Rivals.com.

I doubt Henson was doing that for anywhere near what Orgeron was offered.

Maybe it’s purely a coincidence, but Henson’s decided it’s time to move on.

Former LSU recruiting coordinator Josh Henson has been named Missouri’s new co-offensive line coach.

“Co-offensive line coach”?  Talk about your lateral moves.  And this is a guy that played for the Hat at Okie State and has been with Miles for dog’s years.

It looks like Les tried to have it all, and wound up with nothing.  It will be worth watching to see if there’s much of an impact on LSU’s recruiting in the next couple of years as fallout from this.

Is the Wildcat offense prejudiced?

I don’t care about the NFL particularly and I’m not naive about racism/prejudice in sports – and yet I still found myself puzzled and maybe even a little offended by the reasoning in this post.

The irony of this quote…

On one hand, the Wildcat offense depends on most of the false stereotypes that have dogged black quarterbacks throughout their history; an ability to make plays with their feet instead of their minds and arms. This tragic-yet-very-real perspective may play into many NFL teams’ late-round draft choices and free agency pursuits, as they may look to find QB’s who can come in and be the Reactor X-Factor; a guy who can run like crazy and make a wide open throw.

… is that the author seems to be guilty of the same mindset that he complains about.  Why does he assume that black college QBs are naturals for running the Wildcat on the next level?

Not only that, but I’m not sure how accurate his observations are.  The teams that employ the Wildcat utilize it with a running back taking a direct snap, because of the blocking advantage obtained with the formation.

… The virtue of having a running back take the snap in the Wildcat formation is that the rushing play is 11-on-11 (although different variations have the running back hand off or throw the football). In a standard football formation, when the quarterback stands watching, the offense operates 10-on-11 basis.

At most, the quarterback is asked to do little more than block as a wide receiver in the Wildcat, if he’s even on the field.  So what am I missing here?

Kiffin watch: pundit cat fight!

When the pundits start lining up to argue over who was the first to predict that Junior would flop, you know you’ve got a phenomenon on your hands.