My question is what has happened with these coach's, with the ADs and Boosters etc.. The things we don't see but only hear about. I only know what I read on VN. I have no clue what is true, but when I sit back and evaluate it all over the years. It makes me wonder what is going on. Are things run differently at UT from the money men on down that other successful programs do differently steering coaches away? Seems so.
Questions I ask.. What is the reason so many coaches have turned down the job over the several coaching searches.
Are Boosters actually controlling the coaches etc? The comment made recently.. "boosters would rather be 6-6 and walk the sidelines than 12-0 sitting in the bleachers".
Was PF trying to be the coach behind closed doors as been suggested?
Many more things mentioned over the years. I have no clue, but it's something to be curious about.
The term toxic gets throwed around so much.. Exactly what is making it toxic.. All this would make a coach change from being fired up to defeated in a few years. The players follow the tendency of the coach's with this as well.
Maybe just maybe... Danny White can keep the boosters at bay, not even sure what I mean by that. Make the boosters happy (somehow).. While letting his coach do his job and just coach. DW can also benefit by having CJHs back at all times as well. To me, our new AD is where it all starts, if he can fix what is making UT being labeled as toxic, this will pay dividends to CJH.. And to future hires as well.
All the coaches have basically followed the same 3 year trend.. Now we are seeing a pattern. We have also seen a trend with the ADs as well.
I have no clue, but I do know there is a source to this black cloud that all the other successful universities don't seem to have.. Maybe it's just as simple as the "winning fixes everything"
Rants from a guy that doesn't have a clue but loves this university. GoVols
Yeah, I don't know the answers to most of those questions either, FireBall. Heh. But I think I can help with the shape of it all.
We average folk with average access to information about the program, we don't see most of what actually happens. But that's okay, because 99% of it is just mundane stuff, like a secretary in the front office ordering business cards for the new AD and coaches, or a grounds man painting the lines on the practice field every Thursday morning at 7:30.
Once in a while, though, something significant does happen, and we miss most of that, too. Key booster meeting with the AD, where some deal is quietly made that will affect the stadium upgrades for years to come, or an argument between the OC and DC that unintentionally starts a schism in the locker room that will diminish on-field teamwork and performance for two seasons, or a young freshman suddenly lighting it up on the practice field, so brightly that even the oldest and most jaded of the coaches stops and stares, then the coaching staff starts plotting ways to build the offense or defense around this wunderkind.
So maybe, maybe, we hear about 5% of those significant events. That's like trying to understand all the news that happened today with only 2 of the 40 pages of the newspaper, or trying to succeed at final college exams after taking only 2 of the 40 courses required. Pretty hard to know what's going on, really, with just 5%.
So we're blind. And worse, we're the blind milling around with the blind. And even worse, most of us blind people are trying to convince everyone else that we can see, at least a little bit. So we're making stuff up, whole cloth, out of the merest of rumor and conjecture (like, maybe, a coach having a chip on his shoulder for one reason or another). And we tell each other these made-up bits over and over until the "confirmation bias algorithm" in our brains convince us they are facts. Then we build some more "facts" on top of those invented "facts," and layer more "facts" on the second tier of "facts."
Most of volnation.com is fiction.
We don't act like it is, though, because hey, we've got nothing better to do than sit around discussing Vols football, and we need SOMETHING to talk about. So for us, it's real. Kind of. If we squint. And ignore the silliest bits.
Heh. So at the end of the day, we just gotta have fun here, and try not to get bogged down in it, try not to take any of it too seriously.
Anyway, that's kind of where I am in the evolution of my own view of the program.
Go Vols!