I don’t know about you, but I’m getting sick of reading and hearing about Lane Kiffin.

However, while watching highlights from the Vols first loss of the season (their first “real” game of the season), I couldn’t help but notice that the Orange Smrik standing on the sideline didn’t look quite as excited as he’d been against powerhouse Western Kentucky.

As Crompton came apart before his eyes, Krazy Lips Kiffin didn’t seem quite so cocksure, had lost that sideline swagger.

Then, as the curtain fell with Montario Hardesty getting stuffed on fourth and two, we here in Gator country giggled a little bit and watched Loopy Lane’s confidence get it’s first shot since becoming head coach.

Poor guy, makes you want to pile on and give the guy’s career a good shakedown, especially when you stop and realize that the silence coming from Gainesville this week is plain scary.  It’s that “night time, alone in the forest at Camp Crystal Lake” quiet.  So, let’s make the case against Lane here and we can be done with him by dinner on Saturday.

Now, the man who promised to sing “Rocky Top” all night long upon his victory in the Swamp has had more than his share of debacles since… Well, since he started associating with football. 

This surprises many, as his father is former NFL defensive guru and all-around class act Monte Kiffin, who took a pay/legacy cut by dropping all he had going in the NFL to come help his arrogant son make some noise in the SEC.  Monte is a soft-spoken, hard nosed, football genius who was willing to put aside his own personal glory to come to the aid of his son, who had a monster task before him upon stepping into Fulmer’s shoes at UT.  Monte is a legend in both the pros and in college, where his Tampa 2 defense is imitated and adored almost universally among defensive coordinators.  Monte is a hall of famer, plain and simple.

What the hell Lane?  Did you inherit any of that?

At least from a football standpoint, Lane found that his place would be like his father’s, on the sideline, not on the field.  He went to Fresno State with dreams of quarterbacking, but by his fourth year he decided that a backup QB wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, so signed on as a Student Assistant Coach.  This, my friends, was the catalyst, the single event that enabled all the garbage that followed and laid the groundwork for years of NCAA violations, NFL feuds, and staggeringly moronic, arrogant sound bites.

When you examine the case against Kiffin, even from a non-Gator point of view, you’ve got to wonder what the hell UT and athletic director Mike Hamilton were thinking.

Fulmer is probably still wondering that himself.

Lane spent a little  time in anonymity, learning the ins and outs of coaching with Colorado State (graduate assistant) and in the NFL with the Jaguars (as a quality control assistant…), but it was Pete Carroll who was the first to give him a chance (one I hope the Gators have a chance to thank him for come Championship time).  Lane was hired as the tight end coach in 2001, became the wide receivers coach by 2002, and by 2005 he was the offensive coordinator who replaced Norm Chow on the USC juggernaut.

It was a resume for success, truth be told, as Kiffin was given the reins (shared them with Steve Sarkisian actually) to one of the most potent and well recruited offenses in the NCAA (thanks largely to Chow).  Yes, Kiffin was instrumental in developing talent like Mike Williams, Steve Smith, Lendale White, Reggie Bush, and Matt Leinart, who was incredible under Kiffin, but this was all Chow’s bunch and the offensive mindset didn’t vary too heavily from the former coordinator’s plan.  With Chow’s departure, recruiting also fell at Kiffin’s feet, but what work was there really to do anymore?  By this point, everyone wanted to come to the Trojan party, they were one of the most popular teams in the nation, like a 90210 spin off with football players

And Kiffin?  Well, his time at USC started to peel off his layers, began to revel his nucleus, and you began to hear random media notes about Lane.  People would boast about his work ethic and head for football, then, in the same breath, you would hear about his arrogance and brashness.

Ed Orgeron once mentioned how players under Kiffin very often looked like they wanted to take a swing at him.  “One time, I was going to deck him,” Orgeron said. “He was kind of cocky and brash.”

Also, rumors of NCAA violations started to surface, but Lane started to play damage control.  He worked to control his emotions, tapped into the years of football knowledge amassed both from blood relation and experience, and funneled his fire into the game.  With a 23-3 record while co-calling the offense, he looked to be putting the pieces together for himself, even after losing to UCLA in 2006’s season end, thereby eliminating USC from the National Championship.  Chow was heard later saying he “wasn’t surprised” by the upset and proved it this past week by coaching that same Bruin program to their win over Lane, but that’s neither here nor there, because Lane was movin’ on up.

Al Davis was all smiles when he hired Lane Kiffin to coach the Raiders in 2007, looking forward to the same fire and football energy he once lassoed in a young Coach Gruden.  The youngest coach in the NFL, Kiffin coached his first pro game at 32 and won the preseason opener versus Arizona 27-23.

This marks one of the highest marks Kiffin ever reached in Oakland.

Remember now that Sarkisian had turned Davis down before Kiffin came up and the 32 year old immediately clashed with Davis about drafting Jamarcus Russel.  Nothing good was to come of this relationship (it is the Raiders, so…), but no one expected what was to come.  Whether Kiffin was an inveterate liar or Davis was more insane than a Labrador in a tutu, Lane’s time in Oakland in no way padded his coaching resume.

After whining about Russel, the coach posted a 5-15 overall record, during which time he lost Randy Moss in a career reviving trade to the Pats, didn’t sign his rookie QB until right before week 1, complained about having no control of his team, and seemed to just be disagreeable to players and ownership alike.  He kept claiming to have a five year plan, but cried that Davis kept undermining him, first by preventing the drafting of players Kiffin wanted, then asking to be fired when he couldn’t replace the defensive coordinator.  Davis asked him to resign, Lane stomped his feet in refusal, then runs to the media in the off season to complain that he has no control over his roster when he is given WR Jevon Walker in the draft.

Meanwhile, reports surfaced that Kif was looking at a college opening at Arkansas during the season, but he, of course, denied this.

The final straw came in the infancy of the 2008 season, as Kiffin complained the 41-14 blow out he laid in the season opener wasn’t his fault, because Ryan and Davis called the defense, not him.  Kiffin was given “the letter”, which detailed all his mistakes with personnel and instances where he was undermining the organization.  He was threatened for complaining publically and not doing anything to fix problems with the team, but he was not to be stopped from his media fueled temper tantrums, and was eventually fired, “with cause” on September 30, 2008.

Now, I will state again that this was the Raiders, but did Kiffin really end up looking that much better at the end of it?  Did you really feel sorry for him, or think he got a bad shake?  Of course not, he looked to be just as much to blame for that as the organization was, taking it into the public forum as he did.  Crazy Al and Cocky Lane did nothing for each other, whether for the budding head coach’s career or his worth overall, and he came out of Oakland looking less “the man” than he had been at USC.

So, Tennessee snatched him up for 2 million and, on December 1, 2008, Lane Kiffin replaced Phil Fulmer as the 21st head coach.

He started by annoying Urban Meyer with the “Rocky Top” comment, then turned his attention to recruiting for a team that had dropped off not only the SEC radar, but the national screens as well.  His job was to bring Tennessee back to the public, to brighten the orange for all to see, to entice high schoolers back to a historic program looking to return to their winning ways.  He was supposed to make people proud to claim Tennessee as their alma mater, to bring excitement and pride back to Knoxville, just as Urban was hired to do here.

In the mind of Lane Kiffin, this was to be done through his smack talk and we watched a once glorious program get right back in to the public eye for all the wrong reasons. 

To his credit, Lane understands that recruiting is everything in the SEC, more so perhaps than in any other division, and he knew he needed to get people quick.  Maybe he did learn something in Oakland, how to worry so much about your job that you’ll do anything to try and produce results immediately.

After trash talking Urban at his press conference, he proceeded to call out our Coach for false recruiting violations (which turned out to be a violation for Lane), then lamely apologized.  Apparently, he didn’t know you could call a recruit who was touring another campus and felt that screaming about Urban to the media without making sure he was right wouldn’t make him look like too much of a jackass.  It hadn’t in Oakland, had it?

Oh, he also didn’t knew it was wrong to simulate game experiences through fog machines and mock press conferences for recruits.

Oh, and you can’t mention signing Bryce Brown on the radio before he signs with the Vols.

Oh, and Twittering about new recruits before they sign is also a violation.

This goes on…

Spurrier then got thrown in to the mix for a while, when he came out and flat out asked if Kiffin had even taken his NCAA exams.  Kiffin told a potential Gamecock recruit that signing with them would ensure a life of pumping gas, stole two coaches from the staff, and got in to a reportedly “heated” argument with Spurrier in an elevator.  Then, Saban was tapped to play “Soundbites with the Brat”, when Kiffin took Lance Thompson from Alabama, then publically ridiculed the head coach by bragging that Thompson was the one responsible for bringing in upcoming recruits.  He even started talking to a Raiders coach before the season was over, showing he just couldn’t let it go.

Yep, he sure did make Tennessee a conversation piece again, but did he have to make it a piece of…

Listen, we’ve gotten pounded with anti-Lane sentiment ever since he opened his mouth in December and, yes, we all bought in to it at face value back then, but now that we’ve had the chance to become informed on him, Lane just looks worse and worse.

One of Urban Meyer’s only comments through this all has been about Monte Kiffin, a man Urban has been friends with since Notre Dame.  Meyer claims Monte as a good friend, continues to speak highly of him, and will continue to do so after this Saturday, but that just makes Lane all the more difficult to justify.

In his time at Tennessee, Kiffin has accomplished one task, putting the Vols back on the stage, and though he has boosted recruiting and reminded the country who Tennessee is, that is all he’s done.  He’s got a win against a cupcake and a loss against a semi-power, but hasn’t even sniffed a real opponent before this week.  Fulmer’s team wasn’t that bad, especially on defense, so he wasn’t given another Oakland, but going out and bad mouthing his way to success isn’t worth a damn unless that success is on the field. 

Okay, we know that if you hate Gators, you should go to UT, the whole country knows that, but you can’t really come up with too many other reasons at this point unless you want to play defense under Monte Kiffin (who I hope is the real head of this program now).

Lane was smart enough to go out and steal the best coaches in the game, put together a multi-million dollar staff of people who know the game inside and out. 

So what exactly does Lane do?

My case against Lane amounts to this: I don’t think he deserves to be a head coach yet.  What has he done?  What has he shown us?  No one has been able to give me one good reason why Tennessee was so eager and excited, except for the upswing in recruiting, which comes at a price.  If your program is being dragged through the mud with off field shenanigans, you can’t tell me that you want to invest your future in what catches on to that.  I’ve heard people saying how smart Kiffin is to do what he did, to play the bad guy, the brash idiot, and are praising his ability to “turn a program around”, but I ask why?

Does Tennessee really want to talk all this smack, get the national eye, then lay a big dookie on the field for as many people to see as possible?

There is no case for Lane Kiffin to be a head coach, especially not at a program like Tennessee where he had to come in and replace a legend.  It sends the message to your boosters and fans that bad and good publicity are still publicity, and that is, apparently, the most important thing to the college right now.  Wins and losses?  Bah!  Let people talk about us!!!

Well, if that’s what you were trying to do, then congrats. 

You got what you wished for.

Have a great season, knowing that you’ve helped make a crazy old man in Oakland look sane.

Joshua Bauer is a Columnist for GatorTailgating.com.