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Nobody should be surprised or outraged by what Lane Kiffin did to Tennessee. It's typical of what big-time college athletes has become. In today's world of multimillion-dollar TV contracts and coaches' salaries, there is no shame, no honor, no loyalty, and no heroes.
This incident, and many others like it, are what happens, inevitably, when universities sacrifice academic integrity at the alter of national championships in football and men's basketball. It's a joke to refer to players as “student-athletes.” They are commodities in a meat-market world.
When players decide where to play their college ball, they are selecting a program, not a university. And a program boils down to the head coach. Surely, by now, the players are aware that today's coaches are mercenaries who are apt to bolt the moment somebody waves more money at them.
And surely they're just as aware that the program will fire the coach if he doesn't win enough games. It makes no difference what kind of person the coach is, what his values are, or what his players do in the classroom. It's a business, silly, and the players are the employees.
Contracts in big-time college sports are meaningless. That isn't how they teach it in business school, of course, but it's a fact of life, especially in the Bowl Championship Series leagues. A man's word is not his bond. Neither is a university's. Integrity and decency are for chump.
The Big Orange is in a squeeze of its own making.
The only thing different about the Kiffin situation was that we learned that even Tennessee, previously thought to be one of those “destination” jobs to which every coach seems to aspire, is not immune to getting dissed.
Tennessee is the home of one of college football's greatest traditions.
Tennessee is where more than 102,000 fans attend every home game.
Tennessee is where a coach has all the tools he can possibly need to win national championships.
So Kiffin comes in, rakes in all the money that the Big Orange boosters throw at him, stays one lousy year, and then...bolts for Southern Cal! A better job! His dream job! And all it costs him to buy out of his contract is $800,000, which is only a fraction of what the university would have had to pay him if it fired him without cause for a year.
I understand that Big Orange feelings are bruised as never before. I understand it was a crappy thing that Kiffin did, especially to his recruits. But I refuse to get bent out of shape about it because Tennessee and its big-time brethren have only themselves to blame.
They created this monster and they keep feeding it. Ticket prices and salaries and new facilities keep getting bigger, even when the rest of the economy is in the dumper. If the university presidents had any backbone, they could stop the insanity. Instead, they keep feeding it.
So Lane Kiffin and Tennessee deserved each other. Both are a couple of prostitutes on the make. And, sadly, they are the rule and not the exception. Morality in big-time college sports is as dead as the leather helmet.
In Tennessee's case, of course, there's one more thing. The Big Orange deserves to have this indignity visited upon them in retribution for all the years they have inflicted “Rocky Top” upon the nation's sensibilities.
The football gods have spoken.
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Billy Reed