ESPN : Trash talk, mattress fires and a flying projector : Lane Kiffin's year at Tennessee

quote:

---

Team meetings at the Birmingham Marriott were winding down the night before Tennessee was set to take on top-ranked and unbeaten Alabama in 2009, and Ed Orgeron wanted everyone's attention.

To get the Vols pumped up, the fiery defensive line coach took an overhead projector and hurled it into a wall, where it shattered into pieces. Then it was Lane Kiffin's turn. The brash young head coach had an announcement.

"He gets up there and says, 'I've already called back to the University of Tennessee and told them that we're going to stay an extra night after we beat Alabama tomorrow, and we're going to go eat some of those Dreamland ribs and hang out at their bars,'" recounted Marlon Walls, then a freshman defensive lineman.

The whole room went wild, including Kiffin's father, Monte, the Vols' 69-year-old defensive coordinator.

"I believe Monte even picked up a chair and threw it," then-senior defensive lineman Wes Brown said. "Whatever we could get our hands on, we were throwing.

"It was total chaos."

---

quote:

---

"I just wish I would have had Lane the whole time," said Crompton, now the quarterbacks coach with the CFL's Toronto Argonauts. "He helped develop a lot of guys that weren't developed previously. That's a fact. He did a phenomenal job. Now, people may disagree with me, but I don't really care. I was there."

---

quote:

---

Kiffin so defied convention that players were always guessing what he was going to do or say next. He was known for jogging, usually shirtless, throughout campus with students walking to and from class.

"He'd tell us he was working on his tan, and I told him he needed to get in the weight room if he was going to do that," joked Montario Hardesty

---

quote:

---

Lance Thompson remembers walking past Kiffin on the sideline just before the kick. Lincoln had already missed one field goal and had another one blocked, and he was nursing a painful quadriceps injury. But make or miss, Kiffin was relishing the stress he was putting on his future boss.

"Lane comes up to me and says, '[Lincoln] is hurt, and this is a long kick. It's going to be tough for him to make it. But look across the field at [Saban]. Just look at his face. That in itself is almost worth whatever happens,'" Thompson said.

After the game, Kiffin strolled through the mass of crimson and orange on the Bryant-Denny Stadium field to find Saban for the postgame handshake and said, "Hey, good game, but that's the last time it's going to happen."

A decade later, Kiffin shrugs. "It was the last time it happened. It's the last time he beat me, so I guess that part is true. Like a dumbass, I also didn't know I was going to need a job from him in five years, either."

---

quote:

---

Veteran equipment manager Roger Frazier was able to get the jerseys printed on Wednesday night, even though it was too late in the week to have names on the backs. The players didn't find out until Friday night at the team hotel.

Kiffin told the team, tongue in cheek, that he'd been told by the UT administration that black jerseys weren't going to fly, and if he tried to go over their heads, he'd be fired.

"Screw it. Let 'em fire me," Kiffin said.

The next thing you know, Berry bursts out from behind a door wearing one of the black jerseys.

---

quote:

---

Kiffin had wanted to meet with the players and explain everything upon returning to campus, but it quickly escalated to the point that he didn't get to say very much. What really incensed a lot of the players was Orgeron, the defensive line coach who was joining Kiffin at USC, calling some of the midterm enrollees who had yet to start classes and telling them that if they didn't go to class the next day, they could follow Kiffin and the staff to USC.

A few of those players put Orgeron on speakerphone, and Walker said he quickly grabbed the phone.

"That's when it got ugly because I was trying to calm the guys down and telling them to let Lane say what he wanted to say," Walker said. "But when Ja'Wuan [James] put [Orgeron] on the speakerphone, that's when I grabbed it, told O not to call our players anymore and hung up. I love O and loved playing for him, but that should not have happened."

---

quote:

---

So did the scene on campus, with students and fans burning mattresses and shouting obscenities directed at Kiffin while he barricaded himself in his office at the complex before he could finally be escorted by police to his home in Knoxville sometime around 4 a.m.

Longtime equipment manager Max Parrott, who remains close with Kiffin, walked around with a fire extinguisher, putting out one mattress fire after another. Parrott later decided he was going to leave campus and get a beer to unwind, but a UT police officer tapped on his window as he was driving out of the parking lot.

"He told me, 'I wouldn't leave right now. They'll think you're trying to sneak Lane out of the building and will bust all of your windows out,'" Parrott recounted. "So I went back inside, waited it out and put out a few more mattresses [that were] on fire."

Kiffin, meanwhile, sat up in his office with one eye looking out the window and another eye on the television, where all of the local affiliates were going live.

"It was like watching a movie, and you're in the middle of it," Kiffin said.

---

quote:

---

"We should have never left, but you can't see into the future, and there's no way you know we were going to be hit with the sanctions we were hit with at USC," Monte said. "I still give Lane a hard time. I'd just bought a beautiful new home there in Gettysvue on the golf course [in Knoxville, Tennessee], and while we were trying to sell it, golfers would come by and throw cigar butts up on my porch.

"Maybe we deserved it."

---

quote:

---

Kiffin is convinced that the Vols would have won championships had he stayed. Walls agrees but was unable to avoid taking a playful shot at his former coach.

"Oh, yeah, we were going to win some championships, no doubt," Walls said. "We might have had to give some of them back, but we were going to win some."

---