YouTube 2010 highlights of Bearden High School star runningback Devrin Young, who became Tennessee’s latest commitment in the 2011 recruiting class last night.

Young’s 2010 stats are jaw-dropping: better than 20 yards per run and 50 yards per kick return. He’s listed by Rivals.com as a 3-star prospect, primarily because of his size (5’7″). At that size, it’s hard to imagine that he’ll fit in at UT as a runningback but he could be invaluable in the kick return game. At Bearden, he’s a runningback, defensive back and kick returner, plus a QB in the wildcat formation.

Initially told that he wouldn’t fit into the program, Young was offered a scholarship by Tennessee yesterday morning and committed before the day was out.

Young’s only other scholarship offer was from Stanford but he

was drawing interest from a number of other schools, including some SEC schools.

Despite NCAA investigators snooping around Tennessee’s football program (and basketball…and baseball), Vol fans can take comfort in knowing that UT’s situation couldn’t touch North Carolina’s situation with a 10 ft.

pole.

The mess at UNC just continues to get worse and worse. The latest allegations say that an assistant coach for the Tar Heels was a paid runner for an agent while he was coaching at UNC.

At one point, it looked like Butch Davis was going to be a miracle worker in Chapel Hill, pulling off the improbable challenge of building a powerhouse football program at an East Coast basketball school. But at this point it’s starting to look like Davis might not be able to keep his job at UNC. And, certainly, any reputable coach would take a good, hard look at the situation there before agreeing to replace Davis.

Don’t forget, Davis was at one time considered a frontrunner to replace Phillip Fulmer at Tennessee. I think all UT fans can breath a sigh of relief that it didn’t pan out.

I couldn’t sleep tonight so I sat down and watched Signs. I was reminded again of M. Night Shyamalan’s film-making ingenuity. Signs is a genuinely scary movie. And yet it isn’t a shallow film built around cheap thrills.

It has a plot intricately woven around the age old question, “Is there a God?” There’s well-timed humor throughout. And Mel Gibson is at his best…which is saying something, since Gibson has had plenty of award-winning film roles. It all adds up to make Signs a much deeper, and more fulfilling movie than your typical sci-fi suspense flick.

But, yes, it is definitely suspenseful. I’ve watched the movie a dozen or more times and knew exactly what was going to happen, and I still had chills on a scene or two. In my opinion, which isn’t shared by a lot of people, Signs was MNS’s best film; better even than the Sixth Sense, which was a great film in its own right.

I don’t even typically like movies with an alien plot. (War of the Worlds, the remake, is the only other alien movie I’m really fond of.) But I consider Signs to be one of my top 10 favorite movies. MNS has struggled to recapture the magic ever since Signs was released in 2002 (I thought The Village was excellent, but I’m one of the few), but for a while when he was on top of his game, he wrote and directed great movies. And Signs was as good as they get.

With Halloween just around the corner, this one is highly recommended if you’re one of the few unfortunate souls who haven’t seen it.

My kids like this one because it’s “the song about Pappaw.”

The Scott County Chamber of Commerce was presented a LinkTenn award at Tennessee’s Governor’s Conference earlier this month. The Chamber was one of eight recipients of the LinkTenn award, which recognizes the state’s best websites for economic development. From the presser:

“We’re delighted to have been recognized by the State for our local efforts to promote economic development and recovery through tourism,” commented Stacey Kidd, interim Executive Director of the Scott County Chamber of Commerce.  Scott County was the only rural county to receive the honor, which is typically bestowed on urban communities and regional economic development agencies.  In making the presentation, the platform speaker commented Scott County proved you don’t have to be a large county or organization to have a strong web presence and foster local development. While most of the sites entered into the competition were geared toward business and industrial recruitment, the local website was recognized for stimulating economic growth through tourism—one of Scott County’ s leading indu

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stries.

The Chamber of Commerce website was developed by Garrett Multimedia, a local company owned and operated by Ben Garrett.  “A website is only as effective as the information on it,” commented Garrett.  Garrett attributed the success of the award winning site to a collaborative effort by the County, Chamber of Commerce and other stakeholders who collected the information, which he disseminated on the site.

No! I’m not tooting my own horn!! Stop saying that!

The Wall Street Journal has more on the Jim Justice-led acquisition of National Coal Corporation.

National Coal announced yesterday that it is being acquired by Ranger Energy, which Justice uses as an acquisition vehicle.

NCC made a splash in the Cumberlands in the middle part of the decade, sinking millions of dollars into investments, including the establishment of the first-ever cross-ridge mine (Tennessee’s equivalent of mountaintop-removal mining in West Virginia) and purchasing the former Tennessee Railroad line from Oneida to Devonia in Anderson County.

But NCC has been strapped for cash in recent years, and its revenue flow was severely hampered when it lost a major contract in Alabama. In the spring, Justice’s firm purchased a large portion of National Coal’s assets, including the rail line and the coal preparation plant at Devonia.

The new purchase, which will be completed in mid December, is for the remainder of National Coal’s assets. Ranger Energy will pay $1 per share of the company’s stock, which is a 54% premium on the trading price at close on Monday, which was 65 cents.

In just a few short years, NCC had gone from trading at better than $4 per share to being booted from the market after its trade value declined so low.

So what does the acquisition of NCC mean for coal mining in this region?

It’s only speculation, but one would have to believe it will greatly heighten it. NCC, or now Ranger, if you prefer, has leases on a significant chunk of lands in the Cumberland Mountains, including several mountaintops on the North Cumberlands WMA that have been designated as potential sites for cross-ridge mines.

In recent years, NCC’s fight for survival seemed to limit its production potential. In the 2nd Quarter of this year, NCC produced 117,000 tons of coal through its Tennessee operations.

But Justice is currently building a new company—Southern Coal—which the Wall Street Journal says plans to produce 10 million tons of coal annually. The Tennessee operations will factor heavily into that plan, which means coal production here would have to escalate substantially. Does this mean more surface mines coming to our backyard? Probably.

Who is Jim Justice? He’s one of the wealthiest men in the Appalachians, and is also a noted philanthropist. He inherited Bluestone Industries, one of West Virginia’s largest coal operations, from his father, and served as the company’s president and CEO until selling it to a Russian steel firm, Mechel, for $346 million early last year. He still has large coal holdings in eastern Kentucky. He also owns Justice Family Farms, which is distinguished as the largest cash grain producer on the East Coast with operations in the Virginias and the Carolinas.

James C. Justice Companies, a firm Justice founded to acquire coal companies, was headquartered in Tennessee at one point before moving to Wise County, Va.

Most recently, Justice acquired the famous Greenbrier mountain resort out of bankruptcy.

Cross-ridge mining practices have been under fire in Tennessee in recent years. Knoxville-based LEAF, a faith-based environmental group, has led the charge to ban surface mining above 2,000 ft. in Tennessee. Legislative efforts to ban the practice have created a splash in each of the last two sessions but have ultimately fallen short.

Term-limited Gov. Phil Bredesen has stated his support for such a legislative ban but did not actively work to support the legislation. Tennessee is on the verge of electing a Republican governor who has stated his preference for a “common sense approach” to the subject, but one that appears to include support for a ban on cross-ridge mining.

Since much of the legislative resistance to the proposed mining ban has come from GOP members, it will be interesting to see whether Bill Haslam, as a fellow Republican, has any more influence on the issue than Bredesen had.

Not all of the opposition has come from Republicans, however. Two years ago, outgoing state Sen. Tommy Kilby, a Wartburg Democrat, managed to stave off the ban efforts by keeping the legislation bottled up in committee.

KNS blogger Michael Silence predicts that Tennessee coach Derek Dooley will be on the hot seat with two sub-eight win seasons, citing the SEC coaches who are currently on the hot seat despite their not-so-distant successes: Georgia’s Mark Richt, Ole Miss’s Houston Nutt and LSU’s Les Miles.

Michael is correct on one point: “[T]he patience margin of fans is about as narrow as the attention span of a five-year-old.” I’ve already heard from UT fans who think Dooley should be fired, and still others who think defensive coordinator Justin Wilcox should be fired.

Most reasonable Tennessee fans, however, realize that this program is so far behind that it will take time to build it back up. They’re okay with that and they’ll be patient. For a sobering dose of reality, consider this: Tennessee will take 62 healthy scholarship players to Red Stick this weekend to face LSU. Sixty-two! There may not be a coach in America who could win eight games in the SEC with a roster that depleted.

And consider this: a big reason Tennessee has gotten to this point is the lackluster recruiting results in Phillip Fulmer’s final years at the helm. But an even bigger reason is having three head coaches in three seasons. There is always going to be attrition when a new coach takes over. When a new coach takes over in back-to-back years, that attrition is compounded. The worst thing Tennessee could do at this point would be to have four head coaches in four years…or even in five years. If Dooley were to be fired after this season, the program would be lucky to win four games next year.

Dooley has to have at least three years, and most fans realize that. If, after three years, there are no results on the field or on the recruiting trail, then we can safely consider Dooley on the hot seat. But that’s a long time away.

It isn’t fair to compare Dooley to any of the other three coaches who are on the hot seat. Those coaches are largely victims of their own success. Mark Richt had more success at Georgia than any coach post-Vince Dooley. Actually, you could argue that Richt has done more at Georgia than even Dooley did, especially considering Richt never had a Herschel Walker in the backfield. But with its program on firm standing, Georgia has failed to even sniff the next level. In years when the Dawgs appeared to have the talent to make a run at the national championship, they underachieved miserably. And they’re failing to secure the borders of one of the South’s most coveted recruiting hotbeds. As an example, look at how many players Derek Dooley is already managing to snag from Georgia.

As for Miles, he’s a victim of Nick Saban’s success. Saban turned LSU into a national championship program. Miles won one national championship with Saban’s talent, and has since underachieved.

Nutt instantly made Ole Miss better with a couple of nine win seasons, then came out this season and promptly fell flat on his face with a loss to a FCS program.

Richt and Nutt inherited programs that were in much better shape than the program Dooley inherited at Tennessee. The program Miles inherited was already a national championship caliber program when he took over.

All three underachieved with solid programs. Dooley hasn’t even had time to build his program up yet, much less underachieve.

Compounding the situation at Tennessee is the terrible black eye on the program due to all the off-the-field programs. Dooley sees but one way to rectify that situation, and that is to recruit kids with better character, which sometimes means recruiting some kids who aren’t as highly-rated, talent-wise. And if the NCAA decides to levy major sanctions on the football program, that compounds the situation even more.

It’s all a part of years of mismanagement beginning in the latter part of the Fulmer era and accelerating in the brief Lane Kiffin era that has brought us to this point. Anyone who wants Kiffin fired in 2010 or 2011 is being unreasonable.

Remember: Nick Saban was 6-6, with a loss to Louisiana-Monroe, in his first year at Alabama. Two years later, he won the national championship. Dooley isn’t going to have Tennessee in the hunt for an N.C. that quickly. But it isn’t inconceivable that Tennessee could be back in the SEC hunt in two years. And, given the current state of the program, that’s all anybody can ask for.

Forget Bush. Blame businesses!

Chris Matthews: working hard at becoming more irrelevant than Sean Hannity.

Tennessee’s football woes this season are almost unprecedented. Even 2005 and 2008, two miserable seasons, can’t match what Tennessee is experiencing this season.

• Tennessee’s October games are at LSU, at Georgia, vs. Alabama and at South Carolina. The Vols will be substantial underdogs in each game, starting with this Saturday’s visit to Tiger Stadium, where the Bayou Bengals are favored by 16 pts. Conventional wisdom says the Vols will go 0-for-October. When is the last time that happened? 1991. And that was something of a fluke…UT had two bye weeks in October that year and their only two games were at Florida and at Alabama.

The Gators beat the Vols 35-18 and Alabama staved off a comeback effort by an Andy Kelly-led offense to win 24-19. Before that, to find an October in which the Vols didn’t win a game, you have to go all the way back to 1943…when there was no team due to World War II. The only time Tennessee has ever played a full slate in October and not won a game was 1909, when a tie with Centre was the closest the Vols came to victory.

• It was announced yesterday that Tennessee’s Oct. 9 game at Georgia will kickoff at 12:20 p.m. on the SEC Network. If it seems odd that the Vols’ and Dawgs’ October classic is being relegated to the lunchtime regional slot usually reserved for teams playing Kentucky or Vanderbilt, consider this: unless Tennessee beats LSU this weekend, next Saturday’s meeting between Georgia and Tennessee will pit two teams with losing records. To find the last time Georgia and Tennessee met with neither team featuring a winning record, you have to go all the way back to 1906. Both teams were so miserable that year that the Nov. 21 meeting in Athens ended in a 0-0 tie.

Michael Silence on Lincoln Davis’ reelection campaign:

See if you can find “Democrat” or “Obama” in Lincoln Davis’ latest ad. Or see if you can identify Davis’ party here. Seems he can’t flee the party label fast enough.

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It’s an intriguing race. Scott DesJarlais probably wasn’t going to win even before the divorce brouhaha surfaced, but he has certainly made it too close for comfort for the Davis camp.