The coaching search continues at Tennessee, where Cincinnati's Brian Kelly has emerged as the leading candidate to succeed Phil Fulmer, according to a source in the Knoxville News. Vol blogger Mike Griffith says you can add Jim Leavitt's name to the list, and don't count out Lane Kiffin, either. It's early still.

But one name you can scratch off, according to Griffith: Mike Leach. Yes, he has his supporters. But they know what they want there in Tennessee, and this guy just doesn't fit that Volunteer mold:

Mike Leach still has his name thrown around, but I don't see it. No one is going to come into the SEC and win with Xs and Os -- it takes talent, not gadgets.

Gadgets, indeed: What is this ... this ... forward pass? This bizarre system of having the ball leave the quarterback's hands and travel an appreciable distance through the air to reach an open "receiver" at an extremely consistent rate might produce an unlikely undefeated record and No. 2 ranking where you are, sir. It might result in a system that's finished in the top-10 nationally in total and scoring offense nine years in a row, with five different lightly-recruited quarterbacks, in a program with zero record of national success and no recruiting footprint, in a conference that boasts five of the top 12 teams in the country this week.

But in the SEC? At an historic program where Leach would inherit players who by all rights should run most of his current squad out of the stadium? Preposterous. These gadgets -- this "passing" attack with system quarterbacks who have little shot at the next level -- they will never work in the South. They don't do gadget plays here.

And, I just don't see Leach (47) being able to handle the level of scrutiny that comes with the UT head football coach job. It's a regal position -- hardly a post for someone with erratic and eccentric personality traits.

Ay, Leach could never handle real media scrutiny like the kind he'd face in Knoxville, a true metropolis compared to Lubbock. A scruffy vagabond like Leach could never reach the level of regality achieved by those distinguished ambassadors of the Vol aristocracy for the last 32 years, Phillip Fulmer and Johnny Majors. Tennessee is no place for interesting people with proven track records of success and active, curious, wide-ranging minds.

Remember, Vols: You got to watch tricky lawyers like Mike Leach.