I've always said that college athletics are like politics. Public perception is the name of the game. Just as politicians live and die on the opinions of voters, the success of athletic departments is dependent on the opinions of 18-year-old high school athletes.
Voters' and recruits' opinions are often uneducated, but few people care when it comes to winning and losing. A vote is a vote, just like a five-star recruit is a five-star recruit. Does it matter how you get people to the polls or recruits on campus? As long as you get the A.J. Greens of the world to address their letter-of-intents to your school, you can take advantage of their athletic talents.
National championship-level teams consistently recruit the highest-rated players. It's a fact of life, and while there's always outliers like Luke Kuechly, statistcally, the best teams amass the most five- and four-star talents. Athletic departments like to boast about graduation rates, but at the end of the day, fans care more about wins than they do watching the backup kicker walk across the stage at graduation.
For the past 10 months, everyone's watched Tennessee head coach Lane Kiffin put a massive target on the Volunteers' back, all in the name of recruiting. In the process, he pissed off Urban Meyer, Mark Richt, Nick Saban, and Steve Spurrier - four coaches who have combined to win seven of the past nine SEC championships.
Say what you will about Kiffin. He's smug, abrasive, and still just 34-years-old. A lot of people thought Kiffin was going to get his ass handed to him this season, like a cocky freshman would at an upper-classmen party. Meyer's Florida Gators were supposed to hang 60 on Kiffin; Richt and Spurrier were going to walk out of Neyland Stadium with wins; and Saban presumably wasn't even going to acknowledge Kiffin's existence until he'd already dug his grave.
There's simply no middle ground with Kiffin. Had the Volunteers' rivals blown them out this season, his public relations machine would have failed. His recruiting efforts would have sounded shallow, and he would have been run out of town within two years.
But Tennessee went 2-2 in its four most important games, beating Georgia and South Carolina, and hanging close with No. 1 Florida and No. 2 Alabama. Kiffin now can effectively spin Tennessee's losses as moral victories. Oscar Wilde once wrote, "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you place the blame." And Kiffin can legimately tell recruits that he almost beat the nation's two best teams with a group of players that went 5-7 last season.
Kiffin is a genius at redirecting blame. Since day one, he's said that any attention for Tennessee's football program is positive. He's taken the approach that it's better to be talked about than not; recruits, like every other 18-year-old in the world, are attracted to the spotlight, whether it's positive (winning) or negative (trash-talking). Kiffin will do anything to give his program publicity, whether it's playing rap music at practice or getting Lil Wayne to give him a shout-out in a song lyric.
There's obviously different ways to develop a winning program. But based on the early returns, Lane Kiffin's approach appears to be one of the most effective. He's going to have top recruiting classes every year because his actions, like those of any successful political campaign, are extraordinarily premeditated and manipulative.
It's an approach that few schools have the guts to employ. Kiffin is fast and loose with the NCAA rulebook; he doesn't care about a secondary violation or two. It's risky, and it certainly gets a lot of people riled up. But Tennessee fans definitely aren't going to be complaining if they win a national championship sometime soon.
Be the first to comment on this article!