Staying with Crompton

KNOXVILLE -- Lane Kiffin has moved forward, and the first-year head coach wants all University of Tennessee football players and fans to follow him.

Kiffin announced after Monday's practice that senior Jonathan Crompton will lead the Volunteers offense into Saturday's Southeastern Conference opener at defending national champion and top-ranked Florida.

"Jonathan is our starting quarterback," Kiffin matter-of-factly stated. "We're going to do a better job of managing the game around him and making more plays for him."

Kiffin said the offensive linemen, who graded higher than any position group against Western Kentucky, were the worst group in Saturday's 19-15 loss to UCLA. And he said the wide receivers, who were the second-best group against the Hilltoppers, were "probably the second-worst group" against UCLA.

"If your offensive line doesn't play well and your receivers don't play well, it's going to be very difficult for the quarterback to play well," Kiffin said. "We didn't do anything for him. We dropped some balls. We made no significant tough plays. We let a lot of (pass-rushers) go free.

"Go back and look at that two-minute drill. I don't care who the quarterback was, we weren't moving the ball."

Kiffin spent the better part of an 11-minute, post-practice interview defending Crompton, though he couldn't completely absolve the senior's 13-for-26, 93-yard, three-interception, four-turnover performance.

Crompton -- who won't address the media this week, per Kiffin's request -- said minutes after Saturday's game that he was "seeing the field well."

Kiffin didn't necessarily see it that way.

"Not as well as the first game," Kiffin said. "He did miss some things. In the first game he was almost perfect.

"We're always going to expect that out of him, to play as well as he did (against Western Kentucky). There were some guys running open (against UCLA), and he missed them or didn't see them. That's part of having just his second game in the system, and hopefully we'll continue to improve on that and get rid of those mistakes."

No offensive players met with the media after Monday's practice, and Crompton, center Cody Sullins and freshman wide receiver Marsalis Teague were the only three to speak Saturday.

Teague said the offense still believed in Crompton.

"He called us up together, the whole offense, during the fourth quarter," said Teague, who didn't record a statistic against UCLA after leading the Vols in catches and receiving yards against WKU. "He said, 'Everything's behind us. Let's just go get this victory.'

"Unfortunately, we weren't able to do that, but that just shows what kind of leader that he is."

Kiffin even took the blame for the offensive-line struggles, saying he shouldn't have played banged-up veterans who missed most of last week's practice or pulled up lame Saturday. He also blamed himself for poor play calling, though he didn't add specifics.

"Any time you're calling plays on offense, and you have 208 yards or whatever it was, you've got to look at yourself," Kiffin said. "Anybody can sit here and blame the players. That's the easy thing to do. I've got to figure out a way to do better. I've got to figure out a way to get more completions.

"I think you saw in the fourth quarter, in those last two drives, we got conservative because we'd been turning the ball over. So we went back to doing what we do. I thought we'd throw the ball a little bit better than we did.

"We've got to look at every avenue to find completions and help our quarterback out."

Replacing the quarterback apparently is not the best avenue, in Kiffin's mind, to help the Vols this weekend.

Asked what "stood out" to him about Crompton's poor performance, Kiffin responded, "It stood out that we did not perform very well on offense, starting with me."

Kiffin said Crompton was "apologetic" Saturday night, "which he didn't need to be."

"There were some tough positions we put (Crompton) in," Kiffin said. "We didn't make very many plays for him. The timing was obviously off in the passing game. It was different than the week before. The first week -- obviously we know it was a lesser opponent -- but we played way better."

Kiffin said he was isolating Crompton from the media this week because his quarterback "doesn't need any more distractions.

"I don't feel great just because of what surrounds him," Kiffin added. "As you guys know, he didn't have a very successful year last year. As soon as bad things happen, everything goes back to him. That will always be the situation with the quarterback.

"This is a great university to play at, but when things go bad, because there's so much focus on football, you're going to hear about it. You're going to hear about when you're it at breakfast, when you're at lunch, when you're at dinner, when you're walking to class. That makes it a difficult situation to handle. We're going to monitor that."