Much Ado About Nothing

In case you've been living under a rock for the past 24 hours, Lane Kiffin has bolted his head coaching job at Tennessee for a much cushier position at USC. This has generated much consternation in the sports-writing world, with commentators heated up about Kiffin's consistent violations of NCAA rules while at Tennessee. Stewart Mandel writes about how untrustworthy a coach Lane is, while Jay Marriotti worries about future NCAA violations at USC. At first glance, this is all very troubling and could spell a short and rocky college coaching career for the arrogant Kiffin.

However, college sports (and much of life) is not about the rules. The last time a top program was hammered by the NCAA with real sanctions was the early '90s, when my own Maize and Blue were punished for the Chris Webb violations. However, even at that time, Michigan could hardly be called a basketball dynasty school. And nothing on the order of USC in football. The idea that the NCAA would actually bring harsh penalties to big name coaches and big name programs is naive at best. With the ousting of Jim Leavitt and Mike Leach, we have found out that successful coaches are not immune from the consequences of their actions. But those were firings based on specific, verifiable evidence of harm to the students. When a school essentially sends escorts to recruit high school players, or pays them thousands of dollars in benefits there is little evidence of harm to the student. There is plenty of harm to the college game and the damage that this does to high school players in general, in terms of recruiting, is regrettable but nothing that the NCAA would have the guts to really act on.

So do I think that the Kiffin-USC marriage is going to end in failure? Probably not, but because of reasons that have nothing to do with Kiffin. A) USC is a recruiting goldmine. It's situated on the coast, with beautiful weather, pretty girls, and famous alumns. It also has a national audience the probably eclipses that of most top programs (note that this is my guess). And B) One of the stories that's falling under the radar is the return of Norm Chow to the USC staff from UCLA. Add to that the fact that Monte Kiffin is coming in to coach the defense and you have the coaching formulation for an excellent USC team on both offense and defense.

I wish that poor coaching style and open cheating wasn't rewarded but, until the NCAA actually does something about the latter, Kiffin looks set to lead USC to a pretty impressive season next year. I would say next few years but with his resume, who know where he'll be then?