NCAA Football tennessee Volunteers

In February, Nu'Keese Richardson was one of the crown jewels in Lane Kiffin's first recruiting class at Tennessee.

Kiffin wooed the four-star recruit, a longtime Florida commit, away from Urban Meyer and then bragged about the recruiting victory at a UT recruiting breakfast. At the time Kiffin incorrectly argued that Meyer had committed a recruiting violation by contacting Nu'Keese during his visit to Tennessee.

From there Kiffin also engaged in a public feud with the head coach at Pahokee High School. Richardson was, in fact, the spark that turned Urban Meyer and Lane Kiffin's war of words into a conflagration. Richardson was the apostrophe that loosed a thousand ships, and now he's the apostrophe that will never play football again for the University of Tennessee. On Monday, Kiffin announced that both Richardson and fellow freshman recruit Mike Edwards have been permanently dismissed from the team.

"After extensive and thorough research of the situation over the last four days and considering various disciplinary options, I've decided it's in the best interest of our program to remove Nu'Keese and Mike," Kiffin said. "As I've said many times before, we hold our student-athletes to an extremely high standard on and off the field. Our student-athletes must be responsible members of society, and this type of conduct will not be tolerated.

OXFORD, Miss -- Saturday, I had the misfortune of watching Dexter McCluster run for 4 billion yards against Tennessee. At least that's what it felt like. In all actuality, McCluster merely slashed, dashed, and cavorted his way for 282 yards on 25 carries. In the process Dexter McCluster struck a blow for men named Dexter, made himself millions of dollars in the NFL, and left Tennessee's defense looking as if they weren't familiar with many advanced defensive techniques.

Such as tackling.

All of this took place on a glorious Saturday morning in Oxford, Miss., when, aside from the brutal 11 a.m. kickoff that left Ole Miss students in bed until halftime, it was hard to imagine wanting to be anywhere else. By shortly after 2 p.m., I wished I'd been anywhere else.

At least, that is, when I wasn't marveling over McCluster's utter domination of the Vols.

I've watched football games my entire life, and I've never seen a rushing performance in person that dominant.

Ever.

Twenty-year-old Corey Zickefoose was the victim of an alleged crime Thursday when three Tennessee football players were arrested on charges of armed robbery. Nu'Keese Richardson, Janzen Jackson and Michael Edwards allegedly held up Zickefoose with an air gun in what was later described as a "prank."

Intentions aside (as they do pave the road to hell), one would think Zickefoose would be in full-on lawyer mode, lining up a civil suit and pressing criminal charges. Or at least really angry. But no -- unbelievably, he's asking the university for leniency instead.

Less than a day after Lane Kiffin bragged that no football players had been arrested in 11 months at Tennessee, that record came tumbling down. In a big way.

According to police at 1:43AM Thursday, three freshmen on Tennessee's football team, safety Janzen Jackson, wide receiver Nu'Keese Richardson, and defensive back Mike Edwards, were arrested and charged with attempted arm robbery. The trio allegedly attempted to rob three men parked in a 1998 Hyundai Elantra at a Pilot gas station on Knoxville's Cumberland Avenue.

One of the football players reportedly brandished an air pistol while wearing a black hoodie and demanded money. Another football player wearing a black hoodie opened the other door. The three men said they had no money, at which point the football players fled in a 2010 Toyota Prius driven by a woman, 22-year-old Marie Montmarquet.

Police later pulled over the Prius near the Gibbs Hall dormitory, uncovered two black hoodies, an air pistol, and led the men back to the Pilot gas station where they were identified by their would-be victims. Immediately the Internets exploded. Here was a story that offered the improbable combination of crime vehicle -- 2010 Toyota Prius, location -- the Vols' attempted robbery was in the parking lot of the gas station, Pilot, that is owned by UT's most prominent booster, an air pistol and two of the most famous recruits from the 2009 football season.

Let's dive in.

On Oct. 24, Justin Paschall, a 13-year-old eighth grader at Southside Elementary in Lebanon, Tenn., went to his first Alabama-Tennessee football game. He traveled to Tuscaloosa with his grandfather, Ray Todd, as huge of an Alabama fan as there is in the Southland and two cousins, also Alabama fans. Justin says his first question upon being told that his grandfather had tickets for the game, his first ever Tennessee game, was, "Can I wear my orange jacket?"

Grandpa Ray Todd, Alabama born and bred and now residing in Tennessee, said that he could wear his orange, and on Friday the foursome traveled to Tuscaloosa for the game. Come Saturday, Justin woke up and took wearing orange to a whole new level.

Last week Mike Slive, the Montgomery Burns of the SEC, threatened Lane Kiffin with a suspension and rewrote the SEC policy when it comes to commenting on officiating. All season, Slive has been besieged by officiating errors, coaches sniping at one another, and the continuing onslaught of media coverage having a brand new television contract and two top-ranked teams has brought.

Now, Slive (pictured right) is backed into a corner. Just a few days after Slive announced his new policy on officiating, Urban Meyer teed off on officiating once more, taking a shot at the non-call on a late hit that Georgia delivered to Florida quarterback Tim Tebow.

"That should have been a penalty, in my opinion," Meyer said, "Obviously, it should have been. You've got to protect quarterbacks. That's the whole purpose. It's right in front of the referee."

One of the most frustrating cliches trotted out by college football's BCS defenders is this banal line: Every game counts. I hate this three-word cliche with the fury of a thousand blazing suns. I hate the smugness with which it's delivered, I hate the fact that no one points out the obvious -- name a sport where the games don't actually count-- but I hate the fact that it isn't even true the most.

In fact, this phrase is positively Orwellian because it leaves off the final part of the sentence. Every game counts ... except some games count more than others. How else to explain the fact that everyone can brush off Boise State's win over Oregon because it happened the first game of the season?

I understand we're dealing with a broken system, but right now Boise State is continuing to plummet as they win. I wrote about the glass ceiling that Boise had reached a couple of weeks ago, but has it really reached the point where we just ignore the first week of the season?

In the minutes after he was hired at Tennessee, Lane Kiffin's wife, Layla, shot to the forefront of Google search results. At the time she was pregnant with her third child. None of that mattered. Vol fans, and college football fans across the country, were immediately amazed with how far Lane Kiffin had outkicked his coverage. Layla's good looks and Lane's recruiting offered tangible proof, if any was needed, that my theory -- the hotter the wife the better the recruiter -- was gold.

Now, having delivered her third child, rumors swirled Friday morning that Layla would be posing for Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue. As first reported by the Sports Animal radio station in Knoxville, the rumor swept the Internets and sent pulses racing and subscription rates surging in the Tennessee Valley. Alas, it was not to be. "Absolutely not true," said Tiffany Carpenter, director of UT public relations.

Lane Kiffin's off-field comments have twice earned him reprimands from the Southeastern Conference this season. But now he's finally getting mad props -- assuming people still give mad props -- thanks to the rapper Lil Wayne. In Lil's newest track, Banned From TV, the Southern rapper includes this line, "Smoke weed, talk s--- like Lane Kiffin." Now Lane Kiffin has acknowledged the endorsement via Twitter, tweeting today, "looking forward to another great practice today and a huge game Saturday ... also a huge shout-out to Lil Wayne for boosting our street cred!"

Yep, two of the South's top gangsters are already in fine form. As for fans? Well, UT fans, are already talking about, wait for it, the recruiting benefits of Lil Wayne's lyrical endorsement. Wrote a reader, Alan, this morning in an e-mail to me, "Should help with recruiting. Especially in South Florida, Louisiana, Atlanta and Memphis."

But why stop with recruiting help? Now that he's been bound and gagged by the SEC, Lane Kiffin should hop on the gangster train and play this for all it's worth.

In the wake of Tennessee's 12-10 loss to Alabama, Lane Kiffin expressed displeasure over the penalty disparity -- Alabama received one penalty for 10 yards while Tennessee received eight for 68 -- the lack of a penalty on Terrance Cody on the game's final play, and even suggested that the referees were the reason he chose to kick the field goal from 44 yards rather than run another play to move closer.

"You run another play and you throw an interception or they throw another flag on us," Kiffin said Sunday. "I wasn't going to let the refs lose the game for us there and some magical flag appear."

The SEC fired back today, reprimanding the Tennessee coach.