Will Ed Orgeron Take Down Lane Kiffin? NCAA Begins Looking Harder at Story

Ed Orgeron's stories have changed since they started being told.

The problem is, what he is on record for saying may be enough to land USC in hot water with the NCAA and put Kiffin under scrutiny of the people who are already none too fond of him.

The problem, at least the one we'll discuss in this article, is the wham-bam way the news of Kiffin's hiring by USC went down and the mistakes made as the frenzy of the moment set in.

You would think a former head coach and current recruiting coordinator would know the recruiting rules. Apparently Orgeron did not.

At the time of Kiffin's hiring, teams were in "Dead Time," a time in which coaches can not initiate contact with recruits.

The problem is Orgeron has already admitted to contacting "several" recruits he was not supposed to have contacted. He may as well have admitted it, because there are plenty of witness who actually heard him doing it when one one of the athletes put him on speaker phone for others to hear.

Now if you're going to break the rules, you might want to cover your tracks. No one can confuse Ed Orgeron with James Bond, because many of those calls were placed on a phone that was being paid for by the University of Tennessee.

Records of those calls are very easy to find.

Now, Orgeron is changing his story. At one of his press briefings since taking over at USC, he said, "In my knowledge, I followed the NCAA rules correctly and did what was best for the recruitment of the family and the young men. In my knowledge, I did not knowingly break a rule."

When pressed about how many he talked to and what was said, Orgeron replied, "I'm not going to get into that. All I did was explain options to the families that called me. I had families call me that had questions. I had answers.

"I make tremendously strong ties with families in recruiting. I always try to guide them in the right direction," Orgeron said, defending the calls.

In other words, he's saying these people contacted him.

Hmmmmm.

Funny that the records show a lot of outbound calls to these people and not so many calls from these people. Considering only one of the recruits chose to take "his advice," that means the others are sticking with Tennessee and would have no problem testifying against the coaching staff that ran out on them and attempted to harm their program.

"We heard Coach O in the background calling enrollees and telling them that they got an offer to USC. He couldn't even address us. He couldn't even call us first. Freshmen put [Orgeron] on speakerphone. I called him five times, and he wouldn't pick up. But he's calling them. They put him on speakerphone and he said all of them got offers to USC," said Tennessee player Marlon Wallis who will be a sophomore next season.

These are things that are very easy to either prove or disprove with both phone records and testimony.

They are also things the NCAA is adding to its list of things to look into at USC.

In his first press conference with the USC faithful, Kiffin vowed to run a "clean, disciplined program." However, less than 36 hours earlier, when asked about Orgeron's calls to recruits and the possible rules he was violating said, "I don't know what Ed's done, I can't control what he does."

Really? So much for discipline and, apparently, so much for clean. Can we believe anything that comes from this camp anymore?