Players, coaches and teams with the most at stake this Saturday.

Two games into his Tennessee career, it's already becoming clear just how bumpy the road back to mere respectability will be, much less to actually contending in the SEC. After a hyped offseason and an opening-day strangling of Western Kentucky, the Vols were brought back to earth against UCLA, where all the miseries of 2008 came roaring back with a vengeance: missed reads, head-slapping turnovers, drama in the quarterback-center exchange. In theory, there are ways for Kiffin to be coming into the biggest test of his coaching career with less momentum, but most of them involve multiple players being indicted on federal dog-fighting charges.

Kiffin will be battling the conventional wisdom on two fronts in Gainesville. His first obstacle, of course, is overcoming the idea that his mouth is going to get him into tangible trouble on the field. On paper, yes, it's silly to think that Urban Meyer would try to beat anyone that much harder just because of some seven-month-old trash talk from a booster breakfast; to dwell on such intangibles is to imply that Florida would ever need additional motivation to humiliate the Vols on a national scale, above the simple fact that they're the Vols. Then again, Meyer remembered Georgia's infamous touchdown celebration in 2007 well enough to call two late timeouts last November to prolong the misery of the Dawgs' worst loss to the Gators since the heyday of the Spurrier era. And to, you know, pepper the Gator locker room with incendiary Kiffin quotes throughout the offseason.

Facing a much greater share of Meyer's mercenary wrath than probably any opponent to date, the consensus best-case scenario seems to be that the Vols will be on the wrong end of another multiple-TD spanking. The worst-case scenarios more closely resemble the climactic scene from "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

The other preconceived notion Kiffin will have to overcome -- and the more relevant of the two -- is that he's a boy trying to do a man's job, a novelty act with a lot of chutzpah but without the smarts, substance or gravitas to reverse Tennessee's progressive slump this decade. Much of that has to with his youth -- he's the youngest coach in Division I-A and was but a junior in high school when his predecessor, Phil Fulmer, took the reins at Tennessee -- and his corresponding inexperience: Kiffin's entire head-coaching career consists of 1.25 seasons with the hapless Oakland Raiders, during which he went 5-15 before falling victim to the hair-trigger whims of Al Davis.

Those familiar with the Tennessee program may have detected a method to athletic director Mike Hamilton's madness in tapping Kiffin to replace Fulmer. The Vols have long prided themselves on continuity in their coaching ranks -- Kiffin is only the fifth head coach since 1964 -- so it makes sense that they'd want someone with plenty of coaching years still ahead of him, a potential "lifer" who could become as symbolic of the program as Fulmer or Johnny Majors. Be that as it may, though, the Vols are an awfully high-profile, storied program to be taking a flier on a guy with all of five wins on his head-coaching resumé, particularly when fellow mercenaries like Urban Meyer and Nick Saban, already on the cusp of legend status, will be blocking the Vols' path to reclaimed glory on an annual basis.

But it would be just as hard to set the bar any lower as far as expectations for the Florida game are concerned, and that's the silver lining here from Kiffin's perspective: Nobody expects Tennessee to win this game in the first place. I'd be willing to bet that most fans don't even expect them to stay within five touchdowns of the Gators. The Kiffin-Meyer slapfight has become so hyperinflated that if the Vols even manage to hold the Gators below 60, it can be spun as a moral victory. (At the very least, they'll be on a par with the 2007 team, which got blown up 59-20 by UF to fall to 1-2 but still went on to snag the SEC East title.) If they beat the humiliating 28.5-point spread, they're no longer a speed bump, but rather a gutty group of youngsters perhaps pointing the way toward a Big Orange renaissance. And if, heaven forbid, the Gators get caught napping and allow UT to scrape out a victory over St. Timothy of Tebow, Kiffin instantly gets to take his place alongside Davy Crockett, Dolly Parton and Jack Daniels in Tennessee lore.

It's almost a shame, really, that CBS's cameras will be focused primarily on the field Saturday and not on the Tennessee sideline. We all have an idea how badly Jonathan Crompton is going to be buried in the turf, to the point where actually watching it seems almost gratuitous; the more interesting character study would involve observing Kiffin to see whether he keeps from imploding when his starting eleven, and not his impertinent sound bites, have to do the talking against Urban Meyer, who'll be stalking around, wringing his hands in homicidal glee like a Bond vilain. No, Mr. Kiffin, we don't expect you to talk, we expect you to die -- but if you end up doing something else, that'd be interesting, at least.