There are two issues I want to cover here, one simpler than the other. The University of Tennessee Volunteers have granted a full athletic scholarship to defensive end/tight end Daniel Hood, who aside from being an athletic and academic standout at his private high school, helped an older friend rape his cousin when he was 13 years old. You can read a lot about this, but I liked Dennis Dodd's take at CBS.com, and his follow-up to the Hood apologists who criticized his first piece.
My two issues are intertwined, because how can I parse what an a-hole Lane Kiffin is turning out to be without determining to what extent Hood deserves a second chance*, and I really don't want this post to turn into that debate. I want to talk about how Kiffin is on his very last straw with me. One more ethically dubious move, and he's going over the edge into the Permanent Douchebag category (a slightly lesser ring of hell than Irredeemable Waste of Oxygen, where Michael Vick and Rush Limbaugh live). Because of this:
The former Tennessee staff had been recruiting [Hood]. But last May, one of Phillip Fulmer's assistants called Hood's dad and told him that they were no longer pursuing his son at that point. "I took it as they were dropping me," said Hood, who had planned to commit to the Vols that next week. When Kiffin came aboard, he contacted Hood a little more than two weeks after taking the job and arranged a meeting.
When I consider Kiffin, I feel like the only kid in the parade who can tell that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes. A few years ago he was named the youngest head coach in the NFL - but the problem was that he was coaching the Oakland Raiders. Now, let's think about this... Kiffin's handsome, charismatic, has good coaching genes, and miraculously escaped blame for his 5-15 tenure at Oakland because everybody in football knows that Raiders owner Al Davis is a crackpot. So now, instead of getting busted back down to assistant like most people would after that kind of record, Kiffin gets to be the highest-paid college football coach in the country. Am I the only one who's a little...... meh?
Then he started out his gig as Tennessee's head coach by first poaching his dad from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, after which the Bucs lost their four remaining games and missed the playoffs. Then he poached recruits from Florida while accusing Florida's Coach Urban Meyer of some kind of wacky reverse-poaching, for which the NCAA slapped Kiffin's wrist. And now he's signed a convicted rapist that 27 other colleges - including, initially, Tennessee - also looked at and decided to turn down. So, yeah, the Kiffin Era is not inspiring me as a high-character program so far.
Thank heaven for Pat Summitt. Otherwise I'd never be able to walk into my grandmother's house ever again.
*Oh, what the hell, for the record: Hood has paid what a court decided was his debt to society, and under our system he should be allowed to return to that society. I'm a big believer in rehabilition for criminals. Going to college is a second chance. Going to college free of charge simply because you have athletic talent with few or no questions asked, on the other hand, is not.
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