Friday Football

The college football coaching carousel is getting even more interesting.

GATORS

Reports are out this morning that Utah coach and hot commodity Urban Meyer will be the new head coach at Florida. I just heard this news on Tony Basilio's sports talk show (ESPN 1180 in Knoxville - 100 watts of power!) and this CBS report seems to back up the story.

IRISH

This also means that Meyer doesn't believe that Notre Dame is serious about football just yet. My good friend Scott Bowden says that it was Ty Willingham's time to go - despite the fact that most of the media are crying in their soup over his firing.

Incidentally, Bowden's latest column analyzes how Paul Heyman took 70's and early-80's Memphis-style wrestling and recreated it as ECW in Philadelphia with great success, thereby changing the face of the "sport". If you're into the sport of kings, you should check out his column religiously.

Where will Willingham wind up? Well, if you can't recruit at Notre Dame (even with their higher-than-average academic standards), you're not going to have a whole lot of luck many other places. It may be time for round 2 at Stanford for Ty.

REBELS

Who knows why Ole Miss dumped Cutcliffe. Scuttlebutt is that "Coach Cut" didn't kiss the asses of the big money people down in Oxford. The sad reality of the college game is that the big donors are often the decision makers in the sport, serving as puppeteers for the Athletic Directors. Cutcliffe gave the Rebels the best football that place has seen since the 1960s. Looks like they'll be going back to the scrapheap of lower-level mediocrity, which is fine with me, because the SEC needs more doormats.

VOLS

So what does that mean for my beloved Big Orange? Bad news all the way around.

Let's look at just the SEC East:

• South Carolina: Spurrier
• Florida: Meyer
• Georgia: Richt
• Vandy & Kentucky: It doesn't matter - they'll suck forever.

So, right there we have three coaches that will beat the Great Pumpkin 5 out of 6 times, simply by virtue of bringing better gameplans to the table. Our recruiting base continues to shrink as Spurrier takes back S.C.

And I'm not even touching the SEC West with Nick Sabin, Tuberville and Shula (who may very well get it done eventually at Bama).

What will the Great Pumpkin do in response, besides let more arrested players off the hook and head to the Western Sizzlin' buffet? I guess we'll have to wait and see, but we may be in for a long decade, Vol fans.