Tennessee football: Lane Kiffin signs mustard bottle, trolling Vols

No matter what happens in college athletics down the line, Tennessee football will always pay for its willingness to associate with Lane Kiffin. That one year with him as the program’s head coach back in 2009 has proven costly in so many ways, not the least of which is Kiffin’s addiction to trolling the Vols.

The Ole Miss Rebels head coach did just that once again at SEC Media Days. Kiffin signed a mustard bottle from a fan at the event, a reference to what happened when Ole Miss beat UT 31-26 at Neyland Stadium last fall.

Vol fans were upset about a call late in the game and littered the field with debris, forcing a 15-minute stoppage. One of the items that fell onto a field was a mustard bottle. As a result, Kiffin, the ultimate troll, couldn’t resist a chance to take a shot at Tennessee football with this move.

That wasn’t the only shot at the Vols Kiffin took either. When he took the podium Monday, he addressed how the Ole Miss baseball program was swept by the Vols in the regular season after he threw out the first pitch in that series. Of course, Ole Miss then won the national title. Here’s what he said.

"“I’ve signed a lot of mustard bottles and golf balls, which I normally haven’t, so it’s been a unique offseason. I’d like to say on the golf ball which goes back to the first pitch of the Tennessee game, we got swept by Tennessee and everybody thought it was my fault, I had a plan. I wanted our guys to stay humble and not play very well and then go win the national championship in baseball so I’d like to say that was the plan, so all the Tennessee fans that were excited about sweeping us, there was a plan.”"

Of course, the golf ball reference is due to the fact that a golf ball was also thrown at him when the Vols played Ole Miss last year. Obviously, the anger wasn’t just at the calls in the game, but it was Kiffin’s first return to Rocky Top as a head coach since leaving the program for the USC Trojans back in 2010.

Taking all this into account, fans in Knoxville have plenty of good reasons to dislike Kiffin. He left the Vols, trolled them for years and also depleted the program in the process. Busted recruiting classes, depleting the roster and leaving the program under NCAA investigation were the highlights of his one year there.

After Kiffin left, Tennessee football was a disaster, and Derek Dooley, while flawed as a head coach, had a near-impossible task in trying to fix that situation. Plenty of things that have gone wrong since then aren’t Kiffin’s fault, but he wrecked the first half of the 2010s for UT.