How much star power does a matchup between Ohio State’s Urban Meyer and Alabama’s Nick Saban possess?
So much that Alabama’s big-name offensive coordinator once publicly accused Meyer of cheating—and nobody seems to be talking about it.
But that’s exactly what happened five years ago when Lane Kiffin took over as the head coach at Tennessee. Celebrating his first signing day with the Volunteers, Kiffin looked to make a splash, taking aim at Meyer, then the head coach at Florida.
“I’m going to turn Florida in right here in front of you,” Kiffin said as he addressed a crowd of donors about the recruitment of new Tennessee wide receiver Nu’Keese Richardson.
“As Nu’Keese was here on campus, his phone keeps ringing. And so one of our coaches is sitting in a meeting with him and he says, ‘Who’s that?’ and he looks at the phone and it says ‘Urban Meyer.’ Just so you know, when a recruit’s on another campus, you can’t call a recruit on another campus.
“I love the fact that Urban Meyer had to cheat and still didn’t get him.”
As it turned out, Meyer wasn’t cheating—there was and is no rule that prohibits a coach from calling an unsigned recruit on another campus. It wasn’t the first time that Meyer found himself in the crosshairs of Kiffin, who guaranteed a victory over the reigning national champion Gators in his introductory press conference at Tennessee.
“I’m really looking forward to embracing some of the great traditions at the University of Tennessee,”…
Continue Reading: Inside Urban Meyer’s Forgotten Rivalry with Lane Kiffin
