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…

No matter what Bruce Pearl does in his coaching career, to me he’s always going to be the guy who, as an administrative assistant to Tom Davis at Boston College, once wore the Eagles mascot costume during a game. That says all you need to know about Brucie — he’ll don any persona, no matter how unusual or degrading, in order to get ahead.

That includes Catskills insult comic, apparently. Appearing at a TVA charity fundraiser on Thursday morning, the Tennessee men’s basketball coach made a comment so inappropriate that it set off the auditorium’s automatic sprinkler system. At least that’s what I heard. Bruce, Bruce, Bruce. When will you learn? (Answer unclear). Read more…

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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Earlier this week, Pete Carroll raise a few eyebrows when he more or less said that Washington’s Jake Locker was a better QB than Terrelle Pryor. After all, Carroll’s Trojans just beat Terrelle’s Buckeyes, and #3 USC was expected to humiliate the Huskies up in Seattle today. I mean, come on - Washington was winless last year and needed to beat lowly Idaho last week to end a 15-game losing streak.

Turns out Pete was right all along - and we’re sure he wishes he wasn’t.

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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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Remember when the Tennessee Volunteers football squad did a shirtless photo shoot around an orange Lamborghini? And we all had a pleasant chuckle at the silliness & slightly homoerotic quality of it all? Well, the Duke Blue Devils are not to be outdone in such shirtless-posing matters:

Ladies & gentlemen - presenting your 2009 Iron Dukes motivational poster!

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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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I thought about writing about a shooting on Florida A&M’s campus last night that injured the football team’s star running back just an hour or so after his team won its season opener. But there’s a much more alarming on-campus violence trend to bring to your attention.

(You know what they’re bringing to the streets? Mayhem, that’s what.)

Look out, because Christian bible study kids are apparently the new menace to society. A group of 17 members of the University of Tennessee’s Campus Crusade for Christ were arrested in Knoxville on Thursday night because police thought they were fighting amongst each other on the city’s streets. Yeah, it’s just as ridiculous as it sounds.

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