This is the time of year when we start saying, “Why would anyone want the Raiders job?”

Exhibit A: Lane Kiffin. Or Young Lance, as Al Davis likes to call him.

Don’t ever tell me that the Raiders job is a thankless one. Maybe for the Bugels and the Shells of the world. But it wasn’t thankless for Bill Callahan (he went on to Nebraska). Not for Norv Turner (he could win the Super Bowl this year). Not for Jon Gruden (he became a millionaire and Super Bowl winner). And it certainly hasn’t been thankless for Lane Kiffin.

I had a lot of thoughts when I heard the news about Kiffin.  Many of them are expressed here, but Ratboy says it all in a far more amusing way than I could ever have hoped.

But my first thought was don’t ever say that being the Raiders coach doesn’t pay off. Kiffin went from being Pete Carroll’s coffee boy four years ago to replacing Carroll as the king of USC.  His catapult was the Raiders job, a job where it doesn’t matter if you fail because you have a built in excuse for failure. A modicum of success is viewed as astonishing in the Raiders culture.  And standing up to the old man – as Kiffin did in flame-throwing style – also gets you brownie points from future employers.

Kiffin parlayed a 5-15 Raiders disaster/pissing match into one of the prime jobs in the SEC where he went a mediocre 7-6 and lost to UCLA (harbinger of the future?).  While at Tennessee he was a magnet for NCAA investigations and leaves with a fistful of minor violations hanging over the program. While he takes over a program that seems headed for some sort of major NCAA violation – could be a match made in probation.

Kiffin owes it all to Al. And the overhead projector.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 8:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.