You think you were shocked to see little Lane Kiffin get that plum job at USC? The jilted kids at the University of Tennessee had an awfully NSFW reaction to the news. But people who know Al Davis say that that no one's going to be angrier over that pipsqueak's promotion than the Oakland Raiders owner.
Al Davis is a big USC fan. He was a coordinator at USC in his last college job, from 1957 to 1959. They remain his favorite NCAA football team, his top college football rooting interest.
And now they're in the hands of the guy whose career Davis tried to crush.
"Al loves USC, above all other sporting entities except, of course, the Raiders," Tim Kawakami writes on his Mercury News blog. "Al loves USC almost as much as he hates Lane/Lance Kiffin."
Jerry McDonald says in the Oakland Tribune, "If Lane Kiffin at some point determined his life’s mission would be to make Al Davis miserable, he is a success far beyond anything he’s achieved as a head football coach."
For Mr. Davis, this is like finding out that the girl you just knocked up is a Denver fan. This is like losing a parking space to Randy Moss' SUV. This is like having the Raiders fire Tom Cable and then hire some crappy incompetent 49ers reject -- oh, wait. Sorry.
The infuriating thing is that the Raiders accidentally enabled Kiffin's impossibly fabulous luck. They were the first team to give him a head coaching job. After leveraging his failure here into a college head coaching position, Kiffin won only six games before getting offered the best job in college football.
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"At this rate," Ray Ratto jokes in the Chronicle, "He'll be secretary of health and human services, best supporting actor, queen of the Netherlands and pope - all by 2014."
That may be okay with Al Davis, as long as Kiffin doesn't become the head coach of a BCS Championship team.
Joe Kukura is a freelance writer who would just tell Al Davis to find a different college team to root for.
