I had never heard of this guy until this thread was started, but I recently read that under his contract, he had the option of buying himself out after just one year for $800,000, which he could pay in installments over 36 months, whereas if the school had fired him for other than cause, then he was going to get millions.
What does that tell me? That Tennessee took him knowing that he was not committing to them. I have no sympathy to the school administration, but the fall guys in this might be the students who picked Tennesse last year not realizing that he was basically being rented to stop the bleeding of Tennessee's football program.
From what I have read, he might be NCAA football's equivalent of John Calipari. That may have served Tennessee well. At UMass, they got a new stadium built that they might not have gotten if Coach Cal hadn't pumped up their program. I doubt that many administrators at UMass could honestly say that if they had it to do over again, that they would like to have passed on Calipari as head coach. I suspect that the same can be said of Kiffin at Tennessee.