Lane Kiffin Far From Regretful Of His Attention Grabbing Actions
July 27, 2009 – 6:30 am by Michael Bean
The start of college football is around the corner for the Tennessee Volunteers and the rest of the country. Head coach Lane Kiffin certainly has people in Knoxville excited about the program after a disappointing end to the Phillip Fulmer era. Kiffin joined WGFX in Tennessee late last week to talk about the upcoming season, his thoughts on the media circus that he’s generated since arriving in Knoxville, how only one starting job is not up for grabs and how much more passionate the fans in SEC country are compared to the West Coast.
On whether or not he thinks football is more important in the South than it is on the West Coast:
“Well, I think it’s not even close. And I don’t think anybody would argue that. You can tell from attendance – I believe the commissioner said yesterday that attendance was 97%, or something like that for home games. I believe he also said that 35 or 37,000 people were the average spring game attendance. So there’s no way you could argue that football’s not more important here and that people are more passionate about it. The best example I can give you is that in our first year at Southern Cal, there were 45,000 people in the stands and that’s a pretty powerful school. At Tennessee, even when it’s down at times, we’re still selling out the stadium. So I think that speaks volumes about the issue.”
On standout safety Eric Barry, who Kiffin is just fine saying is the only player whose job is safe:
“He’s the only guy who’s job isn’t open. There’s 21 of 22 jobs open. It only took a couple plays on the highlight film before I got here to know that one. He’s a tremendous player and a great person as well. He flew over here with us and he’s really such a dynamic leader. And everybody forgets the guy’s only been out of high school for two years. He’s only played college football for two years but it seems like he’s been playing forever because he’s made so many plays. And think about the leadership role and what a great example he is for all the kids in our program and young kids in high school. The way he handles himself and to be as young as well doing it, it’s tremendous.”
On if he regrets some of his actions like feuding with Urban Meyer early on in his tenure:
“Well, that’s interesting you ask that. On the way over here, the new Sports Illustrated is out for this week. And it’s the SEC preview. There’s an article in there, it’s not about me or us. It’s about recruiting in the SEC and how many players nowadays stay in state. They don’t want to leave. You’ve got to do something really special to get a kid to leave his state if the program’s performing well. And it broke down all the states and where the kids are coming from. There’s not many kids from Tennessee unfortunately. There’s not that many BCS schools and there’s definitely not many 1st round picks coming out of here. So we’ve got to go national. There’s not just a home base we can rely on. They come here because they grew up fans. And the guy points out in the article that Tennessee being able to land some of the recruits that they landed in that top ten class in that short time. Nowadays, to be able to do that in such short time, that’s probably the only way they could have done it – to get that national attention that we did get right away by our actions and things that we did. And so, I thought the article – you never want to write an article about yourself, but if you wrote an article about our plan and how it’s worked, that was it.”
Listen here to Kiffin on WGFX in Nashville
Tags: Lane Kiffin, SEC Football, Tennessee Volunteers, WGFX
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