Coming into the 2011 college football season, it doesn’t feels like we are facing the dawn of a new season. Rather, it feels like we are emerging from our debris covered shelters into a post-apocalyptic world.

After an off-season filled with controversy; teams being busted breaking every rule in the book and schools flirting with new conferences like a divorcee out at Applebee’s on a Thursday night, the college football world isn’t the same one we left last January. Where buildings with flashy neon signs that said THE Ohio State University and THE U once stood, are now piles of rubble.

But like the obligatory rose growing from the rubble that is a less then subtle metaphor for hope in apocalypse films, college football too has moments that remind us why we love college football so much.

They are called Saturdays.

So with Saturdays about to kick off, it is time to make my bold and almost guaranteed to be entirely wrong, season predictions. And this year, just like ESPN scripted it, the college football success comes down to one thing.

It is all about the quarterbacks.

For me to even consider a team as a national title contender, a team needs to have a proven quarterback.

Last year, Florida and Texas started the season as top five teams. Coming off BCS bowl appearances, a number of starters returning and rosters filled with highly recruited kids coming out high school, it was just assumed they could pick up right where they had left off the year before when they combined for 2 losses.

Instead they combined for 12 losses.

What was the difference? New quarterbacks.

It was just assumed that with the coaches and talent around them, John Brantley and Garrett Gilbert could pick up where Tim Tebow and Colt McCoy had left off.

But a fancy pedigree doesn’t guarantee success. UF and UT last year aren’t the only examples of course. Matt Leinart took USC to 2 straight national title games. His followers, John David Booty, Mark Sanchez and Matt Barkley have never even sniffed a BCS title game.

Applying this lesson automatically eliminates several traditional national title contenders.

Sorry Alabama, time to go poison another tree in defeat.

Tough luck Ohio State, your tattoos this year will need frowny-faces.

Too bad Virginia Tech, another BCS bowl and we would have tried to learn what a Hokie is.

Arkansas, it was fun. Call us when Bobby Petrino abandons you mid-season or Jerry Jones buys you a championship.

With this logic, I envisioned LSU making the national championship game, given the NCAA’s new by-law that states a National title game must always involve a SEC team, but now that Jordan Jefferson tapped his inner-Garo Yapremian during a bar brawl a couple weeks ago, there are just too many open questions.

So which teams are left that fit the mold?

Oklahoma has Landry Jones, his moustache and virginity back but also a (hopefully – crossing fingers – knocking wood) tough game in Tallahassee in a couple weeks and then what appears to be a weakened Big Twelve to navigate.

Oregon should have clear sailing to the BCS title game, if they can get by LSU this weekend and Stanford later in the season. A huge if. Nothing is scarier than a Christmas tree mascot and 50,000 IT nerds spending halftime day-dreaming of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg.

Stanford has to get by Oregon. Which is infinitely harder given the number of uniforms Oregon wears. They always say visualization is a key game preparation. How is someone supposed to visualize beating the Ducks, when they don’t know what they will look like? Are you at a distinct disadvantage if you envisioned the Ducks in white and they come out in neon green? I say yes. Andrew Luck will just have to console himself with the Heisman Trophy they are already engraving for him.

Boise State would seem poised to be in the perfect spot to finally crack the BCS title game crystal ceiling. Kellen Moore returns; they have one last year of the junior varsity schedule of the WAC. Their toughest game is against perennially overrated Georgia on opening weekend. Unfortunately for BSU, there is about 0% chance that pollsters and athletic directors will allow them to steal the money from a less-deserving BCS conference team.

Florida State has a sort of returning QB in EJ Manual, who has the physical tools to be the next Cam Newton (with fewer felonies). But after getting so badly out-coached by Bob Stoops last season, will the Noles prepare for last year’s OU game plan only to be surprised by another new wrinkle? If so, will I momentarily contemplate stabbing Josh Heupel in the kidneys for being single-handedly responsible for several of my worst moments as a FSU fan? The answer to one of these questions is yes.

The Noles also have to go Gainesville, and if Charlie Weis and Will Muschamp haven’t come to blows by then, it will be a tough game. The Noles will also have to navigate their inevitable road ACC game no-show (prime candidates: at Clemson the week after OU and the Thursday night game at Boston College). While every game is winnable, the Noles have beaten the optimist out of me over the last decade, so I will assume they come up short at least once or twice.

Oregon and Oklahoma may both lose once, but pollsters have proven over and over again, that if you are ranked at the top of the polls at the beginning of the season you are given every opportunity to stay there.

Having seen Bob Stoops coach BCS games, I can’t in good conscience pick an OU title (sorry, Turner), so it says here that the Oregon Ducks will win the national title, and Phil Knight will immediately commission 11 different versions of the national title trophy – with each trotted out before a different game next season.

Let’s just hope it doesn’t come down to a ref botching an onside kick call this time.

Last night, we finally got to watch the basketball game we have all been waiting for. A star left the only team he had played for in the league and tonight was a long awaited return against the team he abandoned. He took this team to unprecedented playoff success but could never bring home a title and since he left the team is an empty shell of its former self.

But enough about Jason Richardson and the Suns/Warriors game.

I am too worried about my Noles playing the Hokies for the ACC title and an Orange Bowl berth to get too excited about the NBA tonight. On the one hand, since their epically embarrassing loss to James Madison in week #2, VT has been the best team in the ACC. But on the other, historically FSU has owned Virginia Tech. I think the Noles are something like 13-1 against the Hokies including a national title game, a Gator Bowl, an ACC title game and the most recent game in 2008.

Basically, a legitimate argument can be made for either team. Unlike that game in Cleveland last night, either team can win. Sure, there isn’t the sub-plot of a former player returning to the community that embraced and loved him in the FSU/VT game as there was last night, but there is a championship on the line and more importantly the game may actually be close.

 The melodrama of the city scorned lasted right up until tip-off when the Heat destroyed the Cavs and broke the hearts of Cleveland fans again. It must hurt to not only lose but be laughed at by the very guy who you had come to trust and love more than any other. He was one of your own, he betrayed you and then came back and then rubbed your face in the dirt.

I know Zydrunas Ilgauskas really hurt the city of Cleveland but I have bigger things to worry about.

Shadow: My team has accumulated 5 losses and will still possibly go bowling on New Year’s Day.  I honestly don’t know whether to be happy or sad about that.  Mostly, angry, I guess.  These types of years don’t come around very often for Iowa.  Favorable schedule with most difficult games at home….20 returning starters…..pre-season Top 10 ranking.  Not happy to see us piss that away mostly due to a defense that was our supposed strength not being able to hold leads in the last 5 minutes of games.  Grrrr.  And of course, don’t even get me started on the Broncos.

College: Crime & Punishment Division   

Auburn vs. South Carolina: Should Cam Newton be allowed to play in this game based on NCAA findings this week. Yes, cheer for Auburn; No, cheer for  South Carolina

SD: The NCAA continues to baffle me. As far as I can tell, they simply decided it would be too messy to declare Newton ineligible right now with Heisman and national championship on the line so they gave him a free pass not realizing they are going to be exposed as hypocrites when they change the rule or find him guilty later. Alternatively they now allow any highly recruited athlete to be pimped out *unknowningly* by a family member to the highest bidder. I’m guessing Christie’s or Sotheby’s is on the phone with Tom Lemming about a joint venture as we speak. It would only be fair for South Carolina to win, screw up the BCS and make a mockery of the entire season. Make it a worse mockery than the NCAA has already done, to clarify.

Shadow: Call me completely cynical, but if TCU wasn’t breathing down the neck of the championship game or Auburn had lost the Iron Bowl, something tells me the Cam Newton story this week would be all about vacated wins and season ending suspensions….not quietly announced less than 24 hour suspensions and reinstatements.  Guess I have to go with the Ol’ Ball Coach’s team on this one.

USC vs. UCLA: Should USC be eligible for a bowl? Yes, cheer for USC; No, cheer for UCLA

SD: I’m sorry I didn’t realize Reggie Bush’s mom was playing for this USC team. Why else would a bunch of kids be penalized for something done by a player that was at USC when these kids were still getting under the table payments from boosters of the expensive private high schools they each attended? If Cam is free to play this weekend after being found guilty of basically the same thing Bush was found guilty of, why should USC be paying a price all this time later? I recognize that the only ways Lane Kiffin could be more unlikable would be if he convinced LeBron to film The Decision or introduced Tiger to his first skank, but that doesn’t change that I think USC got jobbed.

Shadow: Based on the NCAA’s new interpretation of their own stupid by-laws, then I absolutely say USC’s ban should be lifted and they should be eligible.  The NCAA is more out of touch with each day that passes.  Plus, I hate Slick Ricky.  Go Condoms.

NFL: Rust Belt Livability Index: Which city would you rather live in?

Buffalo @ Minnesota

SD: In fairness to Buffalo, I have never been there, so an impression that it is all chicken wing places hidden behind 7 feet of snow is really more hearsay then personal experience. OJ Simpson was happy there for several years and never in that time went crazy and killed anyone (at least as far as we know) so how bad can it really be? But I like Minneapolis. It is one of the few upper-midwestern cities I could almost imagine living in. Though Randy Moss told me the food isn’t so good, I will ignore Randy’s advice (he’s from West Virginia after all, he probably just misses the fine dusting of coal that adds that special seasoning in the Mountaineer state) and say rock on Minnesota.

Shadow: Minnesota has access to all 4 major sports (and several lakes, according to their license plates).  Buffalo has wings.  Hmmmm……..that actually makes it a pretty close battle, but I choose Minnesota. 

Pittsburgh @ Baltimore

SD: I’ve spent a lot of time in Baltimore. Ok, it was mostly going to Orioles games and wandering the Inner Harbor, not cruising the back streets The Wire style, but I like the place. I’ve only spent a weekend in Pittsburgh so my experience is less but I have to admit, I was impressed by it. The difference however, comes down to one thing: Steelers fans (see preseason THH for longer rant). They annoy me. Being surrounded by them 24×7 would be torture for me even crueler than anything devised by the Bush regime. After an entire summer spent pretending to be mad at Ben Roethlisberger it sure didn’t take long for the city to re-embrace their little sexual deviant once the season started. Why? Because assaulting girls in Georgia is one thing – football is entirely different. You know there are more than a few Steeler fans who would happily shove their daughters into that bathroom with Big Ben and brag about it to their jealous friends later.

Shadow: Although I am sure this is not true, all I think of when I think of Pittsburgh is the depressing steel mill from the movie All the Right Moves combined with that really crappy JCVD vehicle Sudden Death.  Neither of these things endears me to life in Three Rivers land.  Baltimore gives me access to all of the national monuments in DC that I have never visited but really want to.  No contest.

It is a common malady of approaching middle age to reminisce about the past. The stereotypes for this are those unfortunate souls who seemed to peak in life as the big men of their high school. The Captain of the football team or the Homecoming King who never quite get their life together after graduation day and twenty years later still talk about when they were the biggest fish in the small aquarium that was their high school.

I like to think I have avoided this fate for the most part. I have had plenty of successes since graduating high school: a fine college career; good job that allows me that opportunity to do things I want to do – whether it is a weekend trip to Vegas or a couple weeks in Europe; a hobby of writing anonymously on the internet for the entertainment of myself and about 4 other people. By any reasonable definition my life does not suck.

Yet, for at least one Saturday in 2010, football made me think about when I was younger. The college game we have come to know over the last few years seems to be gone. But it isn’t a new world. It is an old world. Like 1997. The college football world hasn’t so much evolved as it has regressed.

After a decade with just a short list of contenders each year playing hot potato with the national championship, suddenly an entirely new cast has risen up. Some are new players that a decade ago were the punchline of a joke about painted fields or lame mascots.

But for at least one Saturday the headline makers weren’t the new kids on the block. They were schools and people at the top of the game back when New Kids on the Block were being re-packaged and re-sold as The Backstreet Boys.

Even before the weekend officially started, Nebraska made a statement that they are to be reckoned with for the first time in a decade. Going into the Little Apple and decimating Kansas State on national TV, the Huskers combined an option-oriented offense almost indistinguishable from the offenses led by Tommy Frazier and Scott Frost with a defense that finally resembles the Black Shirt teams of the 1990’s that were the standard bearers for defense before Nick Saban’s teams stole it’s belt.

Combine an embarrassingly bad Big Twelve North, a down Texas and no Oklahoma until the Big Twelve title game and the Huskers should coast for quite awhile at this point. Much like those Husker teams of the 90’s, we won’t know how good this team really is but I can’t be the only one excited for a late season Oklahoma/Nebraska game that decides the conference title.

Saturday’s biggest headline maker was the Ol’ Ball Coach. Rendered humble, and worse for his ego, inconsequential, for his entire tenure at South Carolina, Spurrier’s Gamecocks rose up and took down the #1 Crimson Tide. He doesn’t have the wide open attack that he used at Florida to dominate the SEC for the 1990’s but he does have a solid running back playing the Fred Taylor role and a quarterback that for at least one day had more good plays than bad plays. I always loathed Spurrier when he was coaching the Gators: his arrogance, his style, his dominance, all of it combined to make him completely insufferable.

But now, after his humiliation with the Redskins and years of being an SEC East doormat, he has returned as the slightly quieter, more mature Ol’ Ball Coach. The visor was still there, but this time he wasn’t spiking it to the ground after bad plays. 

Maybe it is just relative to his SEC cohorts Nick Saban and Urban Meyer but I find myself almost rooting for Spurrier.

Spurrier’s old team, the Gators also seems to have reverted to the team we got to know in the late 90’s and early 00’s. After years of riding his Holiness Tebow to greatness the Gators appear to be absolutely pedestrian. No playmakers on offense (a secret weakness Tebow was able to conceal since Percy Harvin left school), and a suspect defense. It is fun to watch the genius Urban Meyer consistently fail when he doesn’t have a supremely talented QB leading his team (he gained notoriety at Utah dominating the Mountain West with future #1 overall draft pick Alex Smith – which at a minimum proves the NFC West may not be great but it is better than the Mountain West). LSU coming into Gainesville and beating the Gators not only proves Les Miles is the Austin Powers of college football (he screws up everything, yet it all works out perfectly in the end) but also that Urban’s team has fallen further than anyone realized.

All of the above are just the individual trees in a more important forest: the SEC isn’t what it was. The SEC has won 4 straight national titles but they are going to need a lot of help from the brainwashed sheep that make up the polls to get a chance at a fifth. South Carolina lost to Auburn. Auburn almost lost to Kentucky. LSU should have lost to Tennessee. Tennessee then went out and got destroyed by Georgia. A team that the week before lost to Colorado.

It wasn’t too long ago that the SEC was a conference of tradition-rich programs that were good but not great. There would be several ranked teams but rarely would one figure in the national title conversation. There weren’t great teams that could win week in and week out. They would inevitably fall short one week, like Alabama on Saturday. From 1990 to 2005, SEC teams played for the national title as many times as they have in the last four years. (Bama in ‘92, UF in ‘95 and ‘96, Tennessee in ‘98).

Speaking of another team missing a key ingredient that kept them in the national title conversation the USC Trojans found a way to lose to Stanford. We have been conditioned to think of USC as a perennial power, but as we have discussed, before Pete Carroll showed up USC was mediocre. Bringing in Lane Kiffin is just the first step in devolving back to a USC program that we saw with such luminaries and Paul Hackett and Larry Smith.

Last but, by far, the most important development of Saturday (at least for me) was Florida State’s utter demolition of Miami.

In a series that is known for close games and painful endings, the Seminoles came out Saturday night and pounded the Canes. In fact, they pounded them worse than any game since…1997.

It wasn’t just that the Noles won big and when in previous years they would have let the Canes back in to the game they instead stepped on their throats. It was how they won. They won by running the ball and playing defense. They have become the Penn State Nittany Lions. They have become Bill Parcells’ New York Giants.

After years of the Seminoles playing one good game and then getting embarrassed the following week, usually on the road in the ACC, this team has won 3 straight games; two on the road, all in the ACC, with the closest game being a 20 point win at UVA.

They aren’t fluky wins. They aren’t blocking field goals or returning kick-offs for touchdowns. They aren’t even using fast wide receivers to pick up 15 to 20 yards per pass. They are handing the ball off to a bevy of quick running backs and letting them run behind a grown-up offensive line. Two FSU quarterbacks won Heisman trophies by leading a high powered offense. This year, Christian Ponder lost the Heisman when the Noles got embarrassed by Oklahoma and now has turned the team around by putting stats aside and becoming the change of pace from the running game.

I may not recognize how they won, but it still doesn’t change how it makes me feel.

It makes me feel old.

America’s sports moralists had just begun to breathe again after the hyperventilating response to LeBron’s Decision, when a new issue is sure to send them back to looking for their inhalers and paper bags.

After the extensive NCAA investigation and subsequent punishment for crimes by Reggie Bush and O.J. Mayo, USC has taken action. Athletic Director Mike Garrett is gone and USC has sent back Bush’s Heisman to the Downtown Athletic Club. What they are supposed to do with it I am not sure. Does Cash4Gold accept bronze?

While I don’t condone Bush’s taking improper benefits during his time as a Trojan, I just can’t get overly wound up about USC’s newly found effort to pretend Bush never step foot on their campus.

To my mind, retro-active punishment of USC is the most ridiculous thing in the world. But then maybe I am the only one.

In a poll on ESPN.com, 54% of SportsNation says what the USC program lost as a result of having Bush on the team outweighs previous gains. How? Bush helped resurrect the Trojans. Before the Bush-era USC vacillated between mediocre and above-average. With Bush, USC played in two straight national title games and won one.

And they haven’t been back to a national championship game since he left.

So, my understanding of the poll, is that the majority of ESPN.com users believe it would be better for USC to be consistently mediocre? This point of view to me reeks of the convenience of hindsight.

How many USC fans, if asked in 2004 “would you take two national championship game appearances and one win in exchange for probation in 5 years” would say no? Not a lot. Maybe Mike Garrett, but even he would pause to think about it.

Putting aside the expunging of games – which only really matters to people who need to go back and look up records, stats and scores – what does all of this erasing of the past mean?

During his time, Bush was the most exciting player in the country to watch. He did things on the college football field that I still don’t understand. Does that mean I have to erase my memories of Bush Men In Black style?

Bush was probably one of the 6 most exciting offensive players I have seen play college football – (off the top of my head: Charlie Ward, Bush, Vince Young, Jamele Holieway and Tommy Frazier). Am I now supposed to pretend that didn’t happen?

Yes, he broke rules. But the particular rules he broke had no impact whatsoever on his performance or on USC’s performance on the field.

Would USC have won fewer games if he didn’t take money?

Does him taking money mean OU wasn’t embarrassed in a national title game on TV?

If anything should add an asterisk to USC’s domination in that time period, it is continuing steroid busts that have occurred of players in and around USC at that time – the Ting brothers and Brian Cushing come to mind.  

But after seeing that poll, I started wondering if I am the only one. Are my memories of watching Bush dominate the opposition coloring my view on what is justice? So I posed the following question to my THH cohorts today.

“Does Reggie Bush’s retro-active tainting of everything USC did change your thoughts about that team? Will you mentally add an asterisk to that team in your memories?”

The responses:

Turner: No asterisk.  They were great and Reggie getting a few thousand more dollars in college then I ever made will never change that.

Shadow: No.  I never feel that way when it is money involved (unless the money also involved point shaving or something like that). 

SIDEBAR: To Shadow’s point: if expunging wins from a team is punishment for illegal activities, what would be the punishment for point-shaving? Expunging losses? Switching the result of the game to the team covering the spread? Congratulations, the 1978-79 Boston College Eagles just went undefeated and covered every spread.

And remember Turner is a Sooner fan. If anyone would want to pretend that the Bush allegations change history, it should be a fan of the team that lost 55-21 in the national title game to Bush’s Trojans.

So who are the 54% of the country that feels USC is worse off for having the Bush era? Are they people that are too young to remember Bush playing? Do they not watch college football? Or more likely are they naïve fans who believe every athlete is a saint and when they later learn that isn’t the case feel betrayed and would like to pretend that whole sordid affair never occurred.

To me, college football games are like losing your virginity. Once it has happened it has happened. No matter what you find out later doesn’t change that you did the deed.

You can pretend all you want that it didn’t happen, but the memories will always remain.

The hardest thing in the world is to recognize the end of something before it happens. In retrospect it is easy to look back and say ‘yep, The Cosby Show really went downhill when they brought on Raven Symone’. But did we know it at the time? Did we assume instead, she would step into Rudy’s shoes and things would continue on as if nothing changed?

Or that Steve Guttenberg leaving the franchise after completing Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol, would represent the beginning of the end. Both of that movie franchise and Guttenberg’s career?

In sports it is even more difficult. Look at the Patriots. They were 2 minutes from NFL immortality and then a career back-up made a miracle catch and a perennially underperforming number one draft pick quarterback threw a touchdown pass to a wide receiver who would later shoot himself in the leg. Eight minutes into their next game, Tom Brady’s ACL took out the eye of some kid sitting in the third row. With that the Patriots dynasty ended.

In college football, changes seem to come even more frequently and without warning.

With the rumors and news circulating today, I have the feeling we are again at the crossroads and a team many see as invincible is beginning the slippery slide into mediocrity. After a short decade on top of the college football world, we could be looking at the end of USC’s reign.

News this week of potential sanctions against USC including reduced scholarships and possible banishment from bowl games would seem to imperil USC’s ability to annually recruit one of the best classes in the country. Combined with Pete Carroll’s leaving for the money and autonomy of the head coaching job with the Seahawks (which looks more and more convenient by the day) and being replaced by Lane Kiffin who has accomplished nothing but tick off every fan base he has worked for and it is very easy to see the Trojan program going the way of Desperate Housewives: still technically around but not of importance to anyone not receiving a check to help produce it.

It is easy to forget now that USC is not pre-ordained to always be great at college football. For pretty much the entire decade of the nineties they were average at best, going 68-49-4 from 1990 to 1999 and piling up records of 6-6, 6-5, and 6-6 in 1996, 1997 and 1999.

But USC’s impending spiral into also-ran status is certainly not unique in college football. They aren’t even the only once-dominant program taken down in part by rampant NCAA infractions.

Miami’s domination of college football came to end in the early 1990’s with two national championship game losses in 3 years followed by their own NCAA sanctions (including scholarship reductions and banishment from playing in a bowl game). Miami disappeared off the national scene for nearly a decade and after a brief dominant stretch in the early 2000’s is again mired in mediocrity.

Oklahoma dominated college football through the 70′s and 80′s but after massive misconduct was found including a shooting, a rape and selling cocaine all out of the football dorm (which makes Reggie Bush’s taking money to pay for his parent’s home almost seem honorable). The Sooners were hit with (wait for it) scholarship reductions and banishment from TV and bowl games. The Sooners would not return to the national stage until 2000 and would so harm a young impressionable fan named Turner that he would choose to attend SMU when he finished high school.

Not all dominant stretches end thanks to rampant cheating though. Others end due to coaching changes. Interesting that this also has hit USC: they are the failing program perfect storm with Kiffin playing the Mark Wahlberg role staring up at the tidal wave about to send him to the bottom of the sea.

Alabama’s Bear Bryant retired in 1982. A decade later, the Tide finally made it back to and won a national championship.

Lou Holtz left Notre Dame in 1996. Not-so-coincidentally, the Fighting Irish have been irrelevant ever since. Despite the best efforts of the media.

Tom Osborne retired in 1997 after winning three national titles in 4 years. He was succeeded by Frank Solich who so infuriated the Husker faithful by having the audacity to go 9-3 in 2003 he was fired. Also in 2003 the final Matrix films were released. And since 2003, both the Huskers and Keanu Reeves have accomplished about the same amount. Which is to say not much.

Other eras just end with little warning and the compounding effect of several seemingly small events.

The Seminoles of Florida State, in 2000, fresh off 3 consecutive national title game appearances (and 5 in nine years), lost Mark Richt as their offensive coordinator and kicked presumptive starting quarterback Jared Jones off the team. They started the next season ranked in the top five. Needless to say, they didn’t stay there and have barely sniffed it since.

Did we Nole fans know at the time that the 13-2 loss to the Sooners in the 2001 Orange Bowl would be the end of our ownership of college football? Of course not. We had endured national championship losses before and naturally assumed we would bounce right back the following season.

That was a decade ago and we are still waiting.

Are you paying attention Trojans?

Less than a year ago, a young brash coach came into the SEC – loudly announcing his presence by calling out the best team in the league and employing a number of questionable recruiting tactics. Needless to say the brain-washed ideology-blinded boosters of his school jumped for joy while the rest of the conference seethed at the arrogance of the new arrival.

Amazingly I am not talking about John Calipari.

As the dominoes continued to fall from Pete Carroll’s epically bad decision to move to Seattle and coach the Seahawks, there was one domino I was not expecting – Lane Kiffin accepting the USC head coaching job.

Only a year into his tenure at Tennessee, I never expected Kiffin to leave one of the most passionate fan bases in the country to go back to USC. At Tennessee he had the backing of school re-emerging from the stagnating pool that was the final years of the Phil Fulmer era, played in the best conference in football, a backyard filled with the best players in the country and built-in headline inducing rivals in Alabama and Florida on his schedule every year. In short, he was on his way to becoming deified by one of the most ravenous fan-bases in the country like Nick Saban has been in Alabama.

Instead he returns to USC to become ‘the guy who coached after Pete Carroll’. Sure, he will have continued success as he slowly empties the cupboards of Carroll’s annual top-five recruiting classes but has anything this guy done foreshadowed him keeping USC at the level it is currently?

Not to mention the always on the horizon possibility that the NCAA could finally dust off their investigation of Reggie Bush and impose sanctions on the Trojans.

Looking at Kiffin’s career objectively and the best comparison I can come up with is that he is the Jay Cutler of football coaches. He is young, brash and has never won anything yet continues to convince people he knows what he is doing. He left his first job after a blow up with management that in hindsight appears to be as much his fault as the seemingly crazy owner.

By now, it seems like a lifetime ago but we must remember USC is not pre-ordained to be a college football powerhouse. Before Pete Carroll came they were an also-ran in the Pac-10 still trading on the glory days in the 1970’s.

they came to Florida State in 1998 and the most memorable thing about that 30-10 drubbing was that Giles Pellerin, who had attended every USC game for 75 years, was introduced and got a standing ovation from the Nole crowd. Really, that is it. Back then beating USC was on par with beating Louisiana Tech for us – just another patsy to practice on until Miami or Florida came to town.

Speaking of the Gators, it is pretty obvious they are the big winners out all of this. Beside the inevitable shifting of recruiting commitments from Tennessee to UF that will stream out over the next couple weeks, there is also the feeling that this is the anointing of UF as the owners of the SEC East for the foreseeable future. There are no challengers left for UF – whether “Tin Man” Meyer ever gets a heart or not. Georgia are perennial underachievers with a 9 win ceiling that are happy if they keep the losing deficit at the World’s Largest Cocktail party under 20. Steve Spurrier will never get the talent in Columbia to compete with UF. And now Tennessee is a colossal mess.

This doesn’t even factor in the psychological edge that comes along with the one person in the SEC that called out UF, scurrying with his tail between his legs back to southern California where football ranks on the priority scale just below a good fish taco.

So, in this one move, it seems to me that we have sealed the fate of two of the biggest programs of this decade. USC will spiral down into mediocrity while the beautiful people migrate away from the Coliseum to cheering on the new Los Angeles Jaguars in a couple years. And the Gators become perennial SEC Championship game participants and BCS Title game candidates.

Maybe I am being too kind to Lane by comparing him to Jay Cutler.