DESTIN — Lane Kiffin was busy doing what Lane Kiffin does best, which is answering a simple question with a three-act play complete with numerous twists of plot. In a matter of 30 minutes Tuesday morning, Tennessee’s new football coach did a rock solid impersonation of Peggy Fleming by skating around a few tough questions with lengthy answers that did everything but come straight to the point. When he wasn’t skating, he was doing his best to sound like Al Pacino in “The Godfather,” who said, “It’s not personal; it’s strictly business.”
It has only been a few months since Kiffin took the Tennessee job and in that time he been a lightning rod for controversy. He hasn’t even coached one game in the Southeastern Conference and yet he’s taken his shots at Alabama coach Nick Saban, LSU coach Les Miles, Georgia coach Mark Richt and South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier in addition to calling Florida coach Urban Meyer a cheater the morning after National Signing Day. As if that’s not enough, he’s also insulted everyone in the community of Pahokee and he’s committed at least three NCAA violations because he couldn’t stick a sock in his mouth.
Kiffin probably needed to stick a sock in his mouth again Tuesday morning when the Southeastern Conference Spring Meetings convened at the Sandestin Hilton. His rambling answers and self-centered explanations did nothing to lessen his image as a loose cannon looking for an opportunity to shoot.
He was a stark contrast to Meyer, who has reason to be upset after Kiffin publicly accused him of cheating in the recruiting battle for Nu’Keese Richardson of Pahokee. When Meyer arrived at the meetings he was surrounded by reporters who had just finished the 30-minute session with Kiffin and he made it abundantly clear that he wasn’t going to be drawn into a war of words.
“I’m here to talk about my team,” Meyer said more than once. And that’s exactly what he did. He avoided any confrontational remarks that could fuel a feud with Kiffin that he is intent on keeping private. Make no mistake about it. Urban Meyer is not happy with Lane Kiffin, but he will deal with things in his own way.
We’ve seen this side of Meyer before at this very place. Just last year at the SEC Spring Meetings he was asked point blank how he intended to respond to Georgia’s Mark Richt, who sanctioned a rush the field celebration in the 2007 Florida-Georgia game in Jacksonville. Meyer seethed for months over that incident but he wouldn’t allow himself to be drawn into any kind of public tussle, instead giving his paybacks are hell response with a couple of time outs called in the final minute in 2008 when the Gators were ahead 49-10. Richt got the message loud and clear.
Meyer’s response Tuesday was measured. It was calculated and cool. That’s the way he handles things. Maybe the best way to describe it is a don’t get mad, but always get even approach.
Tuesday morning Lane Kiffin tried to convince everyone that he was shrewd and calculating, too. Only problem was, his mouth got in the way.
He went to great lengths to explain there is method to his madness, that all this controversy is part of a master plan catalogued on the pages of a three-ring binder. When he was canned by Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis four weeks into the most recent NFL season, Kiffin said he had plenty of time on his hands so he made a master plan for four colleges, one of which was Tennessee.
He said he penned all this stuff while he was waiting to go to his next job and once he went to work, he has worked the plan to near perfection.
It’s not abundantly clear if Tennessee AD Mike Hamilton was privy to a plan that included rubbing the rest of the SEC raw and showing casual disregard for the NCAA rules but Hamilton’s statements in the last couple of months seem to indicate he’s rather pleased with business as usual Kiffin style. Maybe that comes across as shrewd and calculating in Knoxville or wherever else the Big Orange Nation congregates, but it’s not winning friends and influencing people anywhere else in the SEC.
Not that Kiffin cares. If he cared he might have taken the time to make a phone call to Meyer to offer up a personal apology for calling Meyer a cheater.
Or he might have made it a point to single Meyer out Tuesday to say, “Sorry about that … it won’t happen again.”
He might have, but he didn’t.
Instead he defended the public apology he made only after it was demanded by Meyer, Florida athletic director Jeremy Foley and SEC commissioner Mike Slive. Kiffin said that a public, national apology was good enough.
Maybe that’s good enough in Southern California, where Kiffin worked for Pete Carroll and perhaps it’s good enough in other parts of the country where football isn’t nearly as important as it is in the south. The SEC, however, is NOT the kind of league where you call the coach who has won two of the last three national championships a cheater, particularly when there’s nothing at all to indicate that the accused coach has ever willfully broken a rule. Say he cheated on his income tax or covered up players cheating on a music appreciation test, but whatever you do, do not accuse the coach of cheating unless you’ve got the goods on him. Kiffin didn’t have the goods. He just let his alligator mouth bite a chunk out of his hummingbird butt, that’s all.
In doing so, Kiffin said it was business. It wasn’t personal. He also said that he doesn’t expect any hard feelings from the other 11 coaches in the SEC.
“I would expect everybody to be extremely professional and understand that each job is different and each of us have a different job to a different university and a different athletic director to a different team,” Kiffin said. “I wouldn’t think that there would be any hard feelings by anybody toward anybody. I just talked to Coach (Steve) Spurrier coming out of the out of the elevator. I think at the end of the day everyone understands that we all have specific jobs for our university and there should be nothing personal.”
In Lane Kiffin’s world, it’s all business and nothing personal. In Urban Meyer’s world, if you interfere with his business it’s always personal and the way he sees things, Lane Kiffin has interfered with his business. Kiffin is smart enough to know that there are naive kids out there that will never pay attention to the apology but they will hear the part about cheating and think that if a coach at a university like Tennessee says it, it must be true. That makes it extremely personal for Meyer, who goes to extraordinary lengths to run a clean ship.
Tuesday morning, Lane Kiffin tried to make this his personal stage and about the only thing he accomplished was to show that he doesn’t know a thing about Urban Meyer.
Meyer made it a point to let Kiffin have all the stage he wanted, just as he let Mark Richt have his day in the sun at the SEC Spring Meetings last year. We all know what happened to Mark Richt.
Figure something similar for Lane Kiffin. In Urban Meyer’s way of thinking, that’s what you call righteous.