WBIR-TV in Knoxville reports today that “freshman safety Nyshier Oliver was arrested on November 7 and charged with shoplifting at a department store in West Town Mall.”

The police report says Oliver was spotted putting a brown shirt worth approximately $110 in a Dillard’s bag. He was arrested around 1:45 that Saturday. That was just over five hours before the Vols were to play Memphis in the homecoming game at Neyland Stadium. Oliver will have an arraignment in the matter on November 23rd.

November 7? But didn’t Lane Kiffin trumpet the Vols’ clean arrest record after that date? Here’s Kiffin on Nov. 12, five days after Oliver was arrested and the day before the arrest of Nu’Keese Richardson, Mike Edwards and Janzen Jackson on robbery charges:

“We’ve had zero arrests in now 11 months here.”

But Kiffin didn’t stop there. He lied again. Read more…

Tennessee haters are already having a field day with the arrest of three Volunteers for an attempted robbery at a gas station last night in Knoxville. Jimmy Buffett’s The Great Filling Station Holdup is getting more plays today than your friendly, neighborhood adult webcams.

(Somebody might wanna update the “news” page fellas)

Yesterday, Lane Kiffin mentioned that he and his staff needed to “continue” to keep his players out of law-breaking circumstances:

(Credit: LSU Freek)

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On Halloween, to go with the black and orange is probably Lane Kiffin’s only best idea since he got to Knoxville. (Besides taking off his shirt.)

(Did Layla have anything to do with the change? Seriously?)

Not everyone agrees with my assessment though.

On the left is another style the Vols have gone with in the past.

I actually like the black pants better than the black tops, but guess they wanted to get away from the O-Line resembling pumpkins at least one home game this season. Read more…

Some Web sites offer you “insider” information on which teams to put money on during the week’s big football games. But only Sports by Brooks has the ultimate insider: Jesus Christ. That’s right, each week Our Lord and Savior will descend from Heaven to offer His insight into the week’s top games. And with over 60 percent of all college and NFL players attributing their success to Him, no one is more qualified to pick winners.

I know a lot of people wrote into me (bigbettinjc@godmail.com) to give me grief for going 2-3 last weekend. To the people who doubt my wisdom, I can just say that this is a journey and not a short trip. Or as Proverbs 19:11 says, “A man’s wisdom gives him patience; it is to his glory to overlook an offense.” So instead of asking how your picks did, we’ll just use our knowledge gleaned from last week’s games to make better picks.

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Normally, you don’t see a broadcast booth spend a plurality of a football game raving about the “time of possession” statistic. Then again, normally, you don’t see a team win said battle by a full 30 minutes of game time, which is precisely what Miami did to Indianapolis last night. And then again, you don’t normally see a team control the ball for fewer than 15 minutes of the game… and win anyway.

(”Okay, so you just scored the go-ahead touchdown. Allow me to retort: BOOOO THUMBS DOWN TO YOU BOOOOOOO!”)

But lo and behold, thanks to the quickest of quick-strike offenses, the Colts did exactly that; thanks to touchdown drives of 1, 6, and 4 plays, Indianapolis prevailed in Miami, 27-23. Indeed, the Colts’ longest drive of the night was a 9-play drive that led to a 2nd quarter field goal; on the other side of the field, the Fins had exactly one shorter drive: an 8-play, 25-yard drive that ended in a punt. After that, literally every drive of theirs was 9 plays or longer. That’s the longest shortest drive since [ERROR WE ARE NOT ELIAS SPORTS BUREAU CLIENTS ABORT, RETRY, FAIL?].

Ah, but without turnovers, time of possession is effectively meaningless. Read more…

The biggest story by far leading up to this past weekend’s college football games was the impending beatdown of Tennessee by Florida. It was the game that was going to expose Lane Kiffin as a spoiled, inept brat and cement Tim Tebow’s second Heisman. Urban Meyer, master coach and motivator, would have his Gators so fired up to crush Tennessee that the only concern for the Gators was whether they could fit triple digits on the scoreboard.

Only, um, that never happened. Florida gritted out a rather sloppy 23-13 victory over the Vols that failed to live up to the media’s hype. Kiffin himself was the orchestrator of much of the hype, and quite a few postgame stories fed into that, undeservedly praising him for reigning in the defending national champs and the Football Messiah. Undeservedly? Yeah, turns out that the biggest opponent the Gators might have faced last week wasn’t Kiffykins, but the ever-looming Swine Flu.

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Lane Kiffin’s wife Layla tailgating before last Saturday’s UCLA-Tennessee game:

(Good, ole Rocky Top! - Photo Source)

One more after the jump.

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• A Michigan player punched a Notre Dame opponent during last weekend’s game? Rich Rodriguez has no idea what you’re talking about.

• Duke football players bedevil fans with their own shirtless poster.

• How did Lane Kiffin get to be the coaching genius that he is? By washing Reggie White’s car while his dad coached.

• Bills KR Leodis McKelvin decides not to press charges against the two teens who vandalized his yard after the Pats loss.

• Panthers WR Steve Smith loves teammate Jake Delhomme as a person, but hates him as a QB.

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Tennessee’s Lane Kiffin currently sports a simple 1-1 career record as a college football head coach, but from everything that’s been written about the guy, it feels like he’s been around a lot longer than that. In his first offseason as coach, he got more than his fair share of headlines — mostly because he is kind of an idiot who can’t keep his mouth shut.

(ALL PRAISE BE TO EDSBS.)

He seems to operate on the premise that any publicity is good publicity, even going so far to say that the aforementioned offseason headlines were all part of his master plan to bring Tennessee back to respectability. He’s been ripped as a bad coach, as a spoiled brat, as a liar, and as someone whose meteoric rise is due solely to family connections. Apparently, now he’s trying to change that perception by opening up to sympathetic journalists for long-form puff profiles. Um, Lane — it’s not working.

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For past two seasons, the once-mighty Michigan-Notre Dame rivalry has been mighty crappy. There was ND’s 35-17 wipeout of the Wolverines in South Bend last season, and then there was UM’s 38-0 a$$-whooping of the Irish in Ann Arbor the season before that. So you’d figure that today’s matchup in the Big House would be a big bore.

Big mistake to assume that. Like two aging heavyweights whose glory days appeared to have been behind them, Michigan & Notre Dame traded punches all afternoon (figurative, not literal) as the score see-sawed back & forth. But it was the Maize & Blue who managed the final knockout blow, as Tate Forcier tossed a 5-yard TD pass to Greg Matthews with 11 seconds left. So Hail to the Victors in a 38-34 thriller.

(Time to get those Charlie Weis-bashing billboards back up.)

Speaking of knockouts, another top-5 team from the Sooner state took another tumble on the field in an upset loss.

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