The Friday Random Ten+5 ponders life after Kiffykins.

Earlier this week I managed to establish, in quantitative terms, that former Tennessee head coach Lane Kiffin was actually a dumber hire for USC than Chan "Beige Alert" Gailey was for the Buffalo Bills. No need to thank me; I do it for the kids. But simply making a determination like that is only of so much use if it doesn't come with any suggestions as to who might be better. When Kiffykins inevitably gets shown the door in L.A. after three or four seasons of not coming within 100 miles of the Rose Bowl (metaphorically speaking, of course -- the stadium itself is actually just a quick drive up the 110 from the USC campus), they're gonna need some names, stat.

Well, guess who's got 'em? OK, yeah, Jimmy Sexton, but guess who else? That's right, I do. Don't ever say I never gave you anything, Trojans, because somewhere in this post is your next football coach -- today's +5 is Five People Who Would Make A Better Head Coach Of The USC Trojans Than Lane Kiffin.



Tom Selleck
Kiffykins fancies himself a badass, but he's not even in the same badass solar system as Magnum, P.I., who attended USC on a basketball scholarship in the 1960s. (According to Wikipedia, while in college he made two appearances on "The Dating Game" and lost both times, which is bullshit -- what kind of woman turns down The Selleck?) Based on his experience in films such as "Three Men and a Baby," we know he responds well to high-stress situations; based on his time as Magnum, we know he can restore the swagger to what was, until recently, the invincible hope-crusher of the Pac-10.



Ruffin McNeill
Came within an eyelash of getting Texas Tech's head-coaching position after leading them to a 10-point win in the Alamo Bowl as the interim coach. Turned around the languishing Red Raider defense almost singlehandedly. And don't tell me he's not a leader of men -- if he can train a shrimpy little white guy like Little Mac into a Mike-Tyson-beater, he can coach the shit out of the Trojans.



Song Girl Erin
Young. Energetic. Motivated. Loyal as all-get-out to the Trojans. And let's be honest here: As much credit as Kiffin gets for being a balls-out recruiter, if Lane Kiffin asked you to do something and Erin asked you to do something, whose request would you be more likely to fulfill?



Dave Wannstedt
If all the Trojans are looking for is a guy who tanked in the NFL but has been so-so as a college head coach, why not go with a more proven quantity in the Wannstache, who at least managed to win 10 games this season? Kiffin's barely won 10 games in his career.



Rick Neuheisel
They'd never get him, of course, 'cause Slick Rick's a UCLA man born and raised, but Neuheisel was perfecting the cheeky-young-douchebag-coach shtick when Lane Kiffin was still begging his dad to let him take the Buick out on Friday nights. No angel as far as NCAA sanctions are concerned, but let's be real here, if USC gave a rat's ass about that then they wouldn't have hired Kiffin in the first place. Won a Cotton Bowl at Colorado and a Rose Bowl at Washington, both of which have mostly stunk on ice since he left; UCLA may still be paddling its way back to respectability at the moment, but don't be surprised if, a few years from now, the Trojans are casting envious glances up I-5 at what Neuheisel's been able to put together in Westwood.

No, no, USC, this one's on the house -- as is the Random Ten:

1. Paul Simon, "You Can Call Me Al"
2. When in Rome, "The Promise"
3. Gnarls Barkley, "Open Book"
4. General Public, "Taking the Day Off"
5. Nouvelle Vague, "The Killing Moon"
6. Pet Shop Boys, "One More Chance"
7. Nouvelle Vague, "Fade to Grey"
8. Billy Joel, "Uptown Girl"
9. Lou Reed, "Walk on the Wild Side"
10. A Tribe Called Quest, "Go Ahead in the Rain"

Happy Friday, folks -- your Random Tens and/or suggestions for better options than Kiffykins are welcome in the comments.

Profiles in just not giving a crap anymore.

I assure you this is real:



That's right: Chan Gailey, whitest man in America, innovative architect of "Chan Gailey Equilibrium," and offensive coordinator who was fired last year after three preseason games -- that's right, not even regular-season games, preseason games -- with the Kansas City Chiefs, has been hired to be the head coach of something. In this case, "something" is the Buffalo Bills, a New York-based charitable organization that provides work opportunities for mediocre, washed-up football coaches, in addition to frequently fielding a professional football team.

I have conflicted emotions about this. On the one hand, I am bitterly disappointed to see that Gailey didn't return to the college level and end up at any of Georgia's arch-rivals who were hunting for head or assistant coaches over the past few weeks. (Gailey attended the University of Florida and was a grad assistant there in the mid-'70s; why, oh why did they not see fit to bring him home?) On the other hand, it put a lot of things in perspective for me, as a lifelong Washington Redskins fan, vis-á-vis Daniel Snyder's almost uniformly atrocious ownership. The guy's an idiot, no doubt, but at least he never seriously (to my knowledge) considered hiring Chan Gailey.

So even though I stopped doing the Monday Morning Cage Match a couple months back just because I got kind of bored with it, it seems like the perfect way of determining which coaching hire was more inexplicable: the Chanster to the Bills, or Lane Kiffin to the USC Trojans. Both decisions are redolent with apathy, the actions of managers who for whatever reason lost all hope of being able to hire someone good and were content to simply throw a contract through the car window of the first guy who actually expressed any interest in the job -- actually, in Gailey's case, the hiring was so surrender-riffic that they probably just text-messaged him a contract, but whatever. Using an expanded version of the Cage Match, we shall determine which of the two hires was more embarrassing: Let the Gailey-Kiffin battle royale begin!

EXPERIENCE
You name it, Chan Gailey has coached it, from the lower college divisions to DI-A to the NFL to the World League of American Football, whatever the hell that was. He's only spent two years as an NFL head coach, but he does have 13 years as an offensive assistant, including four Super Bowl appearances.	Thirteen years total as a coach at any level -- well, make that 12.25: He was fired a quarter of the way through his second season with the Oakland Raiders. And actually, you might want to scale that back even further, because I think one of those years was as a grad assistant, and another was a year spent as a "quality control assistant" with the Jacksonville Jaguars. Yeah, ha-ha, very funny, you got coffee for Tom Coughlin. Stop trying to make it something it wasn't, Lane. Then again, he was the offensive coordinator for Southern Cal during the 2005 season, when the Trojans averaged 49 points and 579 yards per game, so there's that.
MORE EMBARRASSING: Kiffin

RECORD
That "Chan Gailey Equilibrium" thing? Oh, it's real. In 13 years as a head coach at various levels, Gailey has assembled an aggregate record of 98-63-1, which averages out to 7.54 wins and 4.85 losses per season. (And 0.08 ties, but come on, you just know he's gonna find a way to tie someone at least once in the NFL.) He is the Toyota Camry of head coaches: satisfactory, dependable, he'll get you from point A to point B ("point B" in this case being the Humanitarian Bowl), but you will never, ever be remotely enthused or invigorated while he does so.	In 20 games with the Raiders and 13 with the Vols, Kiffin is 12-21. Yes, the USC Trojans just hired a guy who's nine games under .500, lifetime. He'll have to go at least 11-2 with the Trojans this season just to get to .500. And as much derision as has been heaped on his UT successor, Derek Dooley, in various corners of the blogosphere, not only is Dooley's 17-20 record better than Kiffin's was when Kiffin first came to Knoxville, it's better than Kiffin's now.
MORE EMBARRASSING: Kiffin

PERFORMANCE AT MOST RECENT JOB
In 2007, the Kansas City Chiefs were 19th in the NFL in passing, dead last in rushing, and next-to-last in total offense; they finished 4-12. In 2008, Gailey's first year as offensive coordinator, they were 18th in passing, 16th in rushing, and . . . seventh-worst in total offense. And they went 2-14. Progress! At any rate, Chiefs head coach Todd Haley was unimpressed enough with Gailey's performance that he saw fit to fire him after just three preseason games the following year. Yeah, I'm gonna repeat that as many times as it takes to sink in.	Went 7-6 at Tennessee, which is considerably less than what most Vol fans expect but better than the team's 5-7 record the season before he arrived. The Vols blew Georgia and South Carolina off the field, got jackhammered by Ole Miss and Virginia Tech, and played agonizingly close games against top-five Florida and Alabama teams that they had no real business staying within three touchdowns of; an average season in pretty much every respect.
MORE EMBARRASSING: Gailey

RECOMMENDED BY
Bill Cowher. Wait, what? Yeah, apparently the Bills went to Cowher to try to lure him to Buffalo, and he said no but suggested his former offensive coordinator from the Steelers. Wow. Cowher is a guy that at least 30 NFL teams would sell their mothers into white slavery to get, so his word means a lot here. So much that it actually counteracts a recommendation from Jerry Jones, who reportedly said he "regretted" having fired Gailey back in 1999. (Actually, since Jer-bear ended up replacing Gailey with Dave Campo, perhaps his regret is sincere.)	Ummm . . . his dad?
MORE EMBARRASSING: Kiffin

GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT
Took the Cowboys to the playoffs in both of his years in Dallas, including his first year as the NFC East champions. (Even if he did proceed to lose in the first round of the playoffs that year and hand the Arizona Cardinals their first playoff victory in 50 years.)	We could say the moral victory against Urban Meyer and the Florida Gators, the equally moral victory against eventual national champion Alabama, but those aren't actual wins. We know what the biggest win of Tennessee's 2009 season was, and it was the prison-shower cornholing they gave to my Georgia Bulldogs up in Knoxville. In retrospect, that might have been the best humiliating beatdown we ever had -- I have to think it accelerated the dismissal of defensive coordinator Willie Martinez and two other defensive assistants who hadn't been getting anything done -- but that doesn't change the fact that, at the time, I wanted to disembowel myself and strangle myself with my own entrails.
MORE EMBARRASSING: Kiffin

WORST FAILURE
Aside from getting shitcanned in the preseason, it'd have to be losing to Georgia all six years of his tenure at Georgia Tech. That losing streak was arguably set into motion by the loss he suffered in his first year with the Yellow Jackets, a 51-7 napalming in which the intimidation was visible in his team's eyes almost from the moment the Dawgs put their first points on the board. From then on, you could almost set your watch by the point Gailey's Jackets would crap their pants against the Bulldogs (though, in his defense, Reggie Ball obviously had a lot to do with that).	Probably getting curb-stomped by Virginia Tech in the Chick-fil-A Bowl, which closed out Kiffin's first and only season. A Hokie offense that struggled to score on East Carolina a couple months earlier went apeshit on the Volunteer defense, winning 37-14 and handing the Vols their sixth straight loss in the Georgia Dome. (Seriously, y'all, just don't play there anymore. You're like the character in the horror movie who goes back upstairs even though it's obvious to anyone with half a brain that they're about to be sliced up like prosciutto.)
MORE EMBARRASSING: Gailey

SPECIAL SKILLS AND/OR QUALIFICATIONS
Well, if Chan Gailey Equilibrium continues to hold in Buffalo, a 7-5 season in college should equate to, oh, let's say a 9-7 season in the NFL. Since the league went to 32 teams in 2002, nine wins gives you just under a 40% chance of making the playoffs -- which, actually, is probably an improvement for the Bills, now that I think about it.	Ruthless recruiter. Also has a fairly hot wife.
MORE EMBARRASSING: Gailey

CONCLUSION: USC's hiring of Lane Kiffin is actually more embarrassing than the Bills' hiring of Chan Gailey. Congratulations, USC: Buffalo hired a coach whose very name has become synonymous with mediocrity and the bare minimum in terms of acceptable achievement -- the "wearing only 15 pieces of flair" of football coaches, if you will -- and yet all available evidence indicates that it was still a smarter move than bringing Lane Kiffin back to Los Angeles. This may seem hard to fathom right now, but in three years, when the Bills are patting themselves on the back for another 8-8 season while the Trojans anxiously fret over whether recruiting violations will keep them from accepting the EagleBank Bowl bid that's otherwise rightfully theirs, you will see that I was right.

He ran through the T . . . and kept on going.

Lane Kiffin seemed like a weird hire to me even back in December of '08 when he was first announced as Phil Fulmer's replacement at Tennessee. There were a few things that made sense about hiring Kiffin from a UT perspective -- as I pointed out over at Dr. Saturday in an article about the big Kiffykins-Urban Meyer battle royale earlier this season, UT is a place that's used to long-tenured coaches, and if you're looking for someone with the potential to be a "lifer," you might as well start with a young up-and-comer -- but otherwise he hardly seemed to fit the mold of either Tennessee or the SEC in general. His southeastern ties were minimal; he didn't have any trace of a Southern accent unless he affected one; and after a series of crusty, older guys in Knoxville such as General Neyland, Johnny Majors, and good ol' Phil Fulmer, Kiffykins definitely looked like the odd man out.

I'm sorry if it seems like I'm being provincial here, and making it sound like Southern-ness is the be-all, end-all of someone's coaching cred. You could just as easily look at it from the other side, because it seemed equally strange (to me, anyway) that Kiffin would go to a place like Knoxville. Tennessee is a relatively high-profile job, and they can certainly write big checks to bring a coach to town, but there are any number of programs on the west coast -- where Kiffin has spent the vast majority of his playing and coaching career -- that could say the same thing. After having played in Fresno, been an assistant in Los Angeles, and reached the supposed pinnacle of his industry (i.e. a head-coaching job in the NFL) in the Bay Area, what possible appeal could a place like little ol' Knoxville hold for a guy like Kiffin? And I don't even mean that as a slight against eastern Tennessee; it would be just as difficult to picture Kiffykins staying entertained in a place like Athens, Oxford, or Tuscaloosa.

Well, now we know just how little Kiffykins was actually engaged in his job at UT -- disengaged enough to bounce for supposedly greener pastures after only one year. And if this rather astonishing report from Clay Travis is remotely grounded in truth, it looks like Kiffin never had any interest in or respect for SEC traditions to begin with. Not only that, but he had one eye on L.A. the entire time. Those doubts I had about Kiffin being a good fit for Big Orange were justified, but not for the reasons I thought: Tennessee seemed to get along just fine with him; Kiffin, on the other hand, just wasn't that into Tennessee.

So while I'm just as inclined as any SEC fan to gloat about the UT football program receiving the administrative equivalent of a late helmet-to-helmet hit just three weeks before National Signing Day, there are a couple things about the whole situation that make me mad -- and not just mad on behalf of my diehard-Vol-fan girlfriend, I mean legitimately personally mad. For one thing, Kiffin bolted Knoxville before Georgia could get a chance to exact revenge for this past season's blowout loss to the Vols, meaning that Lane Kiffin will more than likely end his coaching career undefeated against the Dawgs. Words can't describe how frustrating that is.

But in a larger sense, I feel like Kiffykins just hocked a loogie in the face of the entire SEC. Matt Hinton perfectly summed up the ice-cold truth about the situation when he said that the Vols have been "treated like a Bowling Green-level steppingstone." Look, nobody is less inclined to say nice things about the UT football program than I am, but at the end of the day, even their most hated rivals have to admit that it's a program with a lot of wins, a lot of tradition, and a lot of pride to its credit. Did any of us ever think that a program like that would ever be used as the "fluffer" for a Pac-10 coaching job? And what would we think if it happened to our school? As much as I'm tempted to chortle at the shambles the UT program is in right now, or at the near-riots that erupted in Knoxville last night once the announcement is made, I can't imagine I'd be any less pissed if UGA had been treated similarly by a head coach. Georgia fans, think back to how incensed we all were when Glen Mason turned down our head-coaching job back in '95, only to bolt for the friggin' Minnesota Golden Gophers one season later; imagine if Mason had taken the UGA job, coached there for one so-so year, then left us in the lurch to head up to Minneapolis. (And then imagine if all the new "traditions" for which he'd tossed out Georgia's proud old rituals turned out to be bogarted from Minnesota, and that he went out the door in Athens trying to take our top recruits with him.) Think you would've been ready to pick up a torch and/or pitchfork then? I know I probably would have.



Or to look at it another way, in my lifetime, 13 SEC football coaches have resigned or retired; two have died while still under contract; three have gone to the NFL; and thirty-four have been fired. Only nine, counting Kiffin, have voluntarily left for other college coaching jobs, and four of those guys left for other jobs in the SEC. Clearly, the Southeastern Conference is seen as a destination, not a waystation, in coaching circles; what makes Kiffin think he's so fuckin' special? (Actually, I guess that's a question better left to USC folks to answer, but if their initial reaction to the hire is any indication, they don't have any more idea than the rest of us do.)

So while I have no particular desire to see Tennessee field an elite, or even competitive, football program in the indeterminate future, I stand in some degree of solidarity with the UT students and fans who feel like they've been royally played this morning. Even if it was a dick move that screwed over one of my most hated rivals, it was still a dick move, and what it says about Kiffin's respect (or lack of same) for the winning traditions of the best and most heritage-laden conference in the country is something we should all take offense at. Kiffin is clearly a slimeball of the highest order, to the extent that he and his assistants appear intent on leaving that trail of slime all the way to Los Angeles.

Again, maybe I'm just being more sensitive to this than I ordinarily would be because I've got a UT-alum girlfriend to console. (Holly, to her credit, didn't need as much coddling as you might think; she raged about it for a few minutes, collected herself, then got right to the task of making a list of replacements. This shit's a business, son.) But the fact that it happened to one of my most hated rivals doesn't make this situation any less outrageous. I'll still hope Tennessee loses, for the most part, but at this point I think I'll be rooting just as hard for Kiffin to lose big wherever he goes, just like I'll continue to root for, say, Spurrier, Urban Meyer, and/or Paul Johnson to lose should their careers take them anywhere beyond where they are today. Once a shitbag, always a shitbag, and shitbags like Kiffin need to learn a little humility. They may never learn it in the end, but that doesn't mean the rest of the world should quit trying to teach them.