Football Friday
February 3rd, 2006 at 11:25 am by Preston Taylor HolmesJust a reminder – this Super Bowl Sunday, we’ll be opening up the chat room for anyone who is sitting home drunk watching the game with nothing better to do than yap about it. We’ll also be “live-blogging” it, so stop by if you’re in the neighborhood.
Also on this final Football Friday of the year, there’s a bit of college football news in the air.
Via Michael Silence, Coach Philip “The Great Pumpkin” Fulmer has gone so far off the rails that he’s blaming his brand new 25th-ranked recruiting class on the “kids”. Not only that, he’s calling them liars.
Fulmer topped his worst season as coach at Tennessee with one of his least flashy recruiting classes according to analysts’ rankings. He announced on Wednesday the class of 22 players he and his staff signed, rated 23rd in the nation by analysts at Rivals.com and 24th by Scout.com.
But it’s not just the Tennessee recruits getting the attention. Some of the talk in Knoxville on Wednesday focused on five top players who were thought to have picked Tennessee, but instead signed elsewhere.
“There’s guys that just lie to you — flat lie to you,“ he said. “That goes back to upbringing.“
“It’s the generation now out there,“ he said. “It’s not everywhere, but it’s out there. There are a few out there that make it a show. … You might come or you might not, but just be honest.
If anyone followed the Vols’ horrific 5-6 football season this year, the one thing that The Great Pumpkin never did was accept any responsibility for the slide. Despite workin’ like heck, they didn’t get it done in any shape, form or fashion last season – and now that Fulmer has his worst recruiting class to date, he’s attacking the kids.
This is a coach who makes more than $2 million a year, and blamed last year’s issues on everyone and everything but his own failed leadership and inability to get the job done. It’s downright comical that he’s blaming this sub-par recruiting class on the current generation of kids and their shenanigans.
This is also a coach who brought in old/new Offensive Coordinator David Cutcliffe, and proudly proclaimed that the addition of Coach Cut will restore discipline to the team. The buck stops everywhere but the Head Coach’s office when it comes to Fulmer’s Vols – whether it’s the 5-6 record, the off-the-field discipline issues, or this year’s crappy recruiting class.
Fulmer has made his living off of getting the best recruits from all over the country, bringing them to Knoxville and coaching the talent right out of them. Fulmer’s outrageous winning percentage (and ’98 championship) has been due to superior athletes overcoming mediocre coaching – and now that the pipeline of top-notch recruits is drying up, you can bet your ass that times are only going to get tougher for the (at-one-time) Big Orange.
February 3rd, 2006 at 8:30 pm
so, that Chris Simms thing didn’t really happen?