Talking points: the Lane Kiffin era at Tennessee begins today

Not wanting to let a guy focus solely on coaching his team for the final regular season game? That’s what he’s supposed to do. If that is indeed true, then Tennessee’s athletic department has more arrogance than I first thought – especially because Tech is top 10 and had an outside shot at the NC game at that point.

It’s an issue that’s totally independent of the Kiffin hire. But if Leach wasn’t considered simply because UT thought they could override Leach’s itinerary for team’s final week of practice, any success of the Kiffin hire will come in spite of the department’s hubris. (For the record, you could substitute any coach’s name in this comment. It’s the process I worry about here, not the fact that it was Leach.)

There’s also the potential problem of hiring a guy who’s planning out his retirement. The nice thing about Lane is that he has something to prove. The risk with Monte is that he has nothing left to prove. Nobody will ever doubt his genius as a D-coordinator, but it might be tempting to throttle things back just a bit, relax a little and run the defense on cruise control.

I’m not asserting that he will do that – let’s give the guy a chance, at least – but it’s a possibility we may have to at least watch for.

NEW TOPIC : Who will be the next OC at TN under the Dbl Lane show ?

maybe…perhaps… a….a special teams coach? (fingers crossed.)

A special teams coach is rumored to be imminent with Kiffin.

still funny though.

I hope it’s more Mac than Microsoft.

If UT shows steady improvement, good recruiting, and actual competitiveness against Florida/Alabama, he’ll get more than 3 years. Of course, under those conditions, he’ll be at least competing for the SEC in that span of time anyhow.

Basically, if you take the Mustang and bring the outside linebackers in close enough to defend the middle of the field (where UCLA and basically everybody burned us this last year). You place a little more trust in your secondary that way, but I think we have the secondary to be able to handle it. It also gives you the option of some fun blitz packages, including zone blitzes and blitz fakes.

True: it was designed to place defenders at the optimal timing points in the WCO. Nobody’s really run it against the spread, so that’s a question mark at the moment. But it doesn’t take a lot of adaptation (mostly some tweaks in initial alignments) to make it work against non-WCO offenses quite well.

If Monte comes, his sense of defensive tactics will be more important than the Tampa 2. He knows how to cover the strong suits of an offense, and which weaknesses are ok to risk.

Partly, we’re still getting over the disaster that was this last season. But partly, it’s very hard to get a read on the guy. The coordinators make for fun talk, but we’ll have a better feel on that once they’re finalized.

My take is that he’ll probably work out well. You can’t gauge his actual performance as a head coach on his past, obviously, but there are a lot of indicators that he can be very successful. He works tremendously hard, he had the respect of all of the Oakland players, he runs very effective practices, he recruits hard, and he makes sound decisions on tough issues. (I agreed with Kiffin on every personnel decision that Al Davis vetoed him on – including the players that Davis now wants to get rid of!)

But we were burned once by the unknown, so I think we’ll be skeptical until we see the on-field results.

As this offseason marches on, I’d like to know your impressions as well. You might be one of the “freaks”, but your takes on things are generally pretty solid.

Meh. I don’t entirely get the hire yet. I think Kiffin’s a good guy, but he was my third choice all along. What really, really scares me about Kiffin is that we’re basing a large part of his success on his coordinators. That can all go wrong in a hurry, as we figured out this year.

My coaching failure index is indiscriminate. :)

Weis was my mention. and I’m a huge NFL fan. Pete Carroll was the inverse – an NFL bust who worked out well enough in NCAA. Same with Saban and (apparently) Petrino.

Really, the two require some different skill sets, and not everybody who is fantastic at one job will work out at the other. But that’s beside the point.