NCAA Rule Number 1-4e states:
Numbers shall not be changed during the game to deceive opponents
[S27].
PENALTY—Live-ball foul. 15 yards from the previous spot [S27].
Flagrant offenders shall be disqualified [S47].
We’ve all known a guy like Lane Kiffin. He’s the guy who was smart enough to get by, good looking enough to get by, a good enough athlete to get by, but the kind of guy that just pissed everybody off. He got that kind of reaction because he was sure that he was the cleverest guy in the room, the best looking guy that you know, and Jim Thorpe reanimated.
The truth of the matter, though, was that the “Mr. Smooth” game that Kiffin played worked way too often. The guys at school knew that he was as phony as Washington’s off-season championship. We were sure that the girls would see through his line of B.S. as if it were glass. We knew that no self-respecting young lady could get reeled in by the line that this charlatan was passing out. We knew it as surely as we knew our name. The next day he was seen at Skinner’s Butte making out with Shailene Woodley.
And that is what frustrated us the most. Shailene Woodley should know better. She should be at Skinner’s Butte with…anybody but Lane Freaking Kiffin. Somebody more wholesome and All-American.
Okay, maybe not Ryan Seacrest but someone worthy of her charms.
What it comes down to is jealousy. Lane Kiffin, without anything to show for his career than a PowerPoint presentation by Al Davis where Davis found creative and apt ways of calling Kiffin a liar for 45 minutes, and a boondoggle of a five minutes at Tennessee, has parlayed smoke and mirrors into one of the top jobs in sports. Why can’t that happen to me? Using the Lane Kiffin approach I should be able to parlay 10 months at FishDuck into a $500,000 a year job writing serious works of literature.
This week has brought the sharp glare of negative publicity upon young Kiffin. Guess what? He’s going to skate. He may be told not to do it again, but by and large he is going to skate. As Duck fans, righteous and with a heart full of ethics as we all are, we are going to fume and fret and gnash our teeth about it.
But deep inside we knew it would happen…because we’ve all known a guy like Lane Kiffin-Golden Child.
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Kim Hastings is a 1984 graduate of Northwest Christian College. He cut his journalistic teeth as sports editor of a paper in his home town of Fortuna, CA, and, later as a columnist for the Longview Daily News in Longview, WA.
He saw his first Oregon game in 1977 and never missed a home game from 1981 until a bout with pneumonia cut his streak short in 1997. He was one of the proud 3200 on a bitterly cold night in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1989 for the Independence Bowl, and continues to be big supporter of Oregon sports. He is an active participant on the various Oregon Ducks messageboards as “TacomaDuck.”
