Thursday, January 14, 2010

Orgeron's Final Act on Rocky Top

In hindsight, nobody should be all that surprised that USC brought back Lane Kiffin to replace Pete Carroll.  USC is where Kiffin got his big break, and it's the big stage.  It's easy to dismiss Kiffin's failure with the Raiders (two words:  "Al Davis"), and Kiffin's squad did show some progress this season in Knoxville.

But the NCAA probably won't be too pleased.  They're already on the verge of sanctioning the Trojans, not to mention that Kiffin's already racked up several violations at Tennessee.  Now here's where it gets even more distasteful:  Kiffin's chief recruiter, former Ole Miss coach Ed Orgeron, was trying to sway his Volunteer recruits to follow the party to Los Angeles as they prepared to depart.

Yep, the NCAA is going to have quite the field day with the Kiffin and the Trojan program before all is said and done.

Fresh off of his role in the Mike Leach scandal at Texas Tech, ESPN analyst Craig James is setting the stage to run for the United States Senate in 2012.  And judging from his interview with the Dallas Morning News, his political acumen is even muddier than his football commentary.  He does recite the Teabagger party line decrying health care reform and the financial stimulus package, even reciting long discredited arguments.  I guess he figures since he stands no chance of gaining any support in West Texas from Red Raider fans, he might be able to get enough support of Longhorn or Aggie alumns who also happen to be devotees of Glenn Beck.

UNO is making quite a push to draw a huge crowd to the February 5th hockey game against Ohio State.  Not just a huge crowd...a sellout crowd at the Qwest Center.  You can buy discount tickets online...or if you want to wait until overnight February 3rd, you can go on campus and buy tickets as cheap as $1 each.  Of course, that's if it's not sold out by then.  The first day's ticket sales were 460, leaving under 7,000 remaining.  Can they do it?  Up until last April, I would have doubted it.  But right now, I wouldn't put it past UNO to pull this off.

1 comment:

merlin said...

Was there ever a more perfect match than Kiffen and USC?