Sep. 17, 2009

Kiffin's Vols are prey as they wait for next QB Bray

By Dennis Dodd | CBSSports.com Senior Writer
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His name is Tyler Bray, which seems perfect the weekend of Tennessee-Florida.

As a verb, bray is the noise made by a donkey. To Florida fans there is no bigger ass in Gainesville this week than a certain coach whose name might as well be Lame Kitten.

There, shot taken. Is it out of your system, Gator Nation? Didn't think so. As the Christians travel to meet the Lions for the Slaughter in The Swamp, though, football is almost secondary. Those Florida fans want to see more than a W, they want to see Type O. Tennesseans want to get past this week as painlessly as possible and see the next recruiting class as soon as possible. That's because as a pronoun, Bray is a symbol of Tennessee's future. He is the 6-foot-6 pro-style quarterback from Kingsburg, Calif., who committed to Tennessee last weekend.

Bray might be a bust, he might be a star but at least he is coming to Knoxville. And that means hope. Hope that this current downturn is short. Lane Kiffin, the coach's real name, didn't sign a quarterback in his first class because he wanted to be in on the top prospects for 2010 instead of taking the leftovers from 2009. On the job for only a month, he was still able to land a skill position-heavy class that was ranked in the top 10.

Now Kiffin is having to live with the consequences. A hole remains under center. A big, old doughnut, to be blunt. The Vols' season already has the look of 2008, when having your fingernails pulled out was preferable to watching the nation's sixth-worst offense.

Try to forget Kiffin's, um, oration skills if you can. He was hired for his offensive and recruiting skills. Recruiting? It's coming. The 2010 class is ranked in the top five. That has little to do with Saturday because we won't be able to evaluate Kiffin's offensive skills until he has a quarterback.

You're already seeing the spin start to shift this week. It's not about what's going to happen Saturday, it's what is going to happen in the future.

"We know we're going to get there," Kiffin said. "It's going to take a while to build that."

His mouth cannot be shut and Florida cannot gain satisfaction with this one game after one uncivil offseason. The man was a Pete Carroll lieutenant -- the assistant, by the way, who begged his boss to take a look at a skinny ninth-grader named Matt Barkley. Kiffin tutored All-American quarterbacks and coached in the NFL.

The statistics confirm the current/past state of the Vols. Tennessee is third nationally in total defense, the same place it finished last season. The problem? All you had to do was watch the Vols on first-and-goal from the UCLA 7 late in last weekend's game. Four consecutive runs. Ball turned over on downs at the 1.

There was no faith in the doughnut.

"Clearly Tennessee needed something," CBS analyst Gary Danielson said. "Getting the all-star staff [was good]. The idea to sell that, 'We're going to be an NFL training ground here,' [is good] ...

"They've got to get a big-time quarterback. If I was a big, pocket-passing quarterback, I'd want to go to a place where Peyton Manning played."

Lane Kiffin and Jonathan Crompton will be together just one year before a new QB takes over. (Getty Images)

Publicly, all the right things are being said about Crompton, who has thrown as many touchdown passes as interceptions, 14, in 24 career starts. If message boarders think Crompton looks shaky, backup Nick Stephens apparently is even less of an option. Vol Nation can't wait for Kiffin to start working his quarterback magic, but it might as well check back next season.

"February," AD Mike Hamilton said, "is a long time away."

The Tennessee media guide seemed to be letting fans down easy when it broke down the return of the top two quarterbacks, "[the realization] that neither had taken command of the position ... casts a less optimistic view of the picture."

So the time has come for Kiffin and the Vols to take their whipping. Florida has won the past four pre-Kiffin meetings by an average of 18 points. The Gators have the most talent in the country. Players and coaches have muscled up verbally for the Vols before, supposedly laying the wood on Saturday.

"Do I really need to motivate Brandon Spikes to go hard against Tennessee?" Urban Meyer asked.

Uh, no. It's up to Tennessee to view Saturday as a speed bump or a nuke. Shortly after last week's UCLA loss, Kiffin got commitments from three top-50 players. ("I was blown away," the coach said.) The 2009 class was heavy with skill position players. Kiffin told his coaches to go out for 2010 and get linemen and a couple of returners.

For now, "We're going to have to play like Alabama last year," one insider said. "Play defense, run the ball and manage the quarterback."

Eventually, they want to win like, if not play like, Florida. That's why in Tennessee, Bray's commitment might have been No. 2 on the list of biggest stories of the year after Kiffin's hiring. Bray was recruited by most of the Pac-10 schools, according to his coach. Tennessee came in late in the summer and had the kid in for a visit at the Western Kentucky game. Viola, Kiffin has his quarterback.

Or at least a non-Crompton.

"He's stepping into a good opportunity," Bray's coach, David Steele, said. "They're going to keep recruiting guys. He's going to graduate early, so that will be a big jump for him."

Rivals.com called Tennessee the "hottest team in recruiting right now" and has the Vols' 2010 class ranked No. 4 behind Texas, LSU and Oklahoma. Kiffin is selling what all coaches in his situation can sell, playing time. That and restoring Tennessee to what it once was.

"You do that four years in a row, you have a roster like they [Florida] do," Kiffin said. "I remember reading about three years ago that he [Meyer] made a big emphasis on becoming the fastest team in America. Instead of going for eight yards, because he's recruited so much speed, it goes for 80. It's something that we lack."

But for how long?