Tilting at Windmills

Lane Kiffin, meet Web 2.0.

Facebook, Twitter, et al … let’s just call it Web 2.0 for short (@apocalippz is gonna roast me for my obvious lack of coolness on the subject). Social media isn’t just for 12-year-olds with sparkly Myspace graphics, nor for pederasts anonymously cruising for 12-year-olds with sparkly Myspace graphics. It’s big business with everybody from major corporations such as Dell hawking their wares to pithy blogs letting their tens of readers know there new drivel on the site, down to local watering holes tweeting the latest happy hour specials.

Savvy users can also have their tweets sent to their Facebook as a status message. Your Facebook account will then display whatever you just tweeted in your status on everybody’s Wall.

So, before we move any further … you go on Twitter to tweet, your tweet is relayed to Facebook which puts the tweet up as your status and everything’s in synch. Everybody got that?

Sweet. Apparently Lane Kiffin gets it, too. What he (or allegedly somebody tweeting as him) does not get, however, is what constitutes an NCAA violation.

We need to tweet this up to 88 mph!

We already talked about Kiffin’s moral stance on signing convicted rapists (our sponsors request that you please read the rest of this post before posting your snarky Chaisson rants ad nauseum). Now Kiffin’s getting the Vols into NCAA trouble before his team ever hits the field.

Even Kelvin Sampson likely knows that you cannot talk about a recruit until he’s actually signed the LOI. In fact, I think that may be one rule that even Sampson didn’t break (my lord, if he ever figures out Twitter, we might need to set up a separate blog).

Kiffin, or Kiffin’s tweeting surrogate posing as the L-Train, last week updated his Facebook status with the following tweet:

I was so excited to hear that J.C. Copeland committed to play for the Vols today!

In Web 2.0 parlance vis-a-vis NCAA rules (they’ll get around to monitoring social media as soon as they figure out that confounded text messaging first), that’s akin to not only handing an athlete an envelope full of 100 dollar bills, but doing it in front of tens of thousands of people and announcing to everyone that that’s what you’re doing.

Go buy yourself somethin' nice, OJ.

Kiffin should probably get some backslaps from the SEC inbreds brass. As the leaders in creative cheating, Kiffin has now given them new avenues to explore and is forging a new, 21st-Century rule-breaking trails. Way to stay on (rocky) top, SEC!

Rarely do we have a chance to go inside the recruiting game to see just what happens when coach and recruit sit down to chew the fat.

Enter Lane Kiffin, who is taking the bold step of trying to turn around the life of a convicted rapist. Daniel Hood was Mr. Football in the state of Tennessee last year, which immediately got Kiffin’s attention. His, er, checkered past apparently played right into Kiffin’s recruiting hands, too.

The following is a secret recording of Kiffin hosting recruits at some place off-campus. H/T to the TaW crack(ed) staff for putting this one together:

This is where you expect us to say something about Justin Chaisson’s ultimate set of Craftsman tools, right? From where we sit, Chaisson merely seems like a great but misguided kid. He just needs an opportunity to turn his life around, and we welcome the 6’5″, 250-pound, 4.7 40 DE to the Sooners program. We also would like to thank him for keeping the Las Vegas Bishop Gorman pipeline alive, no matter what it takes. Stoops is a flippin’ saint for giving him that chance.

Actually, Chaisson has already been nominated for the Jason Klotz Bitch Had It Comin’ Award. Being a believer in reform himself, Barnes magnanimously refused to suspend Klotz for punching the clown a punching bag his girlfriend and waited instead until the Baylor game rolled around Klotz actually threw a punch at a guy, in a game.

Lawrence Phillips was unavailable for comment.