“Realistic expectations for Tennessee football hire?”
Not surprisingly, I’ve gotten a ton of questions all week about the Tennessee football hire.
Let’s begin here with something that will blow the media’s minds. It’s possible for Jeremy Pruitt to have been a bad hire and for Greg Schiano to have been a bad hire too. In other words, one hire isn’t necessarily connected to the other.
If you told me today that Tennessee was hiring Greg Schiano to replace Jeremy Pruitt, I would still be opposed to it, and I suspect the majority of Tennessee fans would too. I still believe he would have been a bad hire for Tennessee.
And while there has been a ton of discussion about the Pruitt firing, I think it was the right decision, whether he’d violated NCAA rules or not. By year three, you know whether a coach is going to work out. Pruitt wasn’t going to work out. He was a poor hire — the Kentucky and Arkansas performances alone demonstrated that — and I was afraid Tennessee was going to give him a fourth year and leave everyone hanging in the breeze.
With the firing out of the way — potentially with no buyouts in play at all — as I’ve been saying all week, I think Tennessee will hire its most accomplished head coach since Johnny Majors. That is to say, the number of proven and high quality coaches who are interested in this job has blown me away. I’m not reacting to any media reports on this coaching interest. I’m talking about coaches who have directly reached out to me to talk about the Tennessee job and express interest in it.
That’s why I haven’t publicly endorsed any Tennessee coaching candidate. There are several of those coaches who have reached out to me that I’d be ecstatic if Tennessee hired. It’s not my decision whom to hire, but I think Tennessee fans are going to be happy with the end result, solely based on the number of quality candidates out there interested in the job.
Indeed, I think this is the best bunch of potential coaches Tennessee has had interested in the job since Phil Fulmer was fired back in 2008. I know the doom and gloomers in national media didn’t believe it, but I told you before the Danny White AD hire was announced that Tennessee was going to be in a good spot with this hire. Now after the Danny White hire, which impressed everyone, I feel even better about the options out there.
That’s especially the case because it appears Tennessee is finally committed to deploying the Travis dump truck of cash theory and finally paying big money to accomplished coaching talents, as opposed to hiring lesser known candidates, paying them less, and hoping they work out.
Which is why I’m telling you that I expect Tennessee to hire its most accomplished head coach since Johnny Majors.
Remember, since Majors, who had won a national championship at Pittsburgh, Tennessee has hired: Phil Fulmer, the then-Vol offensive coordinator who had never been a head coach before; Lane Kiffin, who had been a head coach of the Oakland Raiders for just over a year and gotten fired there; Derek Dooley, who was coming off a 4-8 season as a head coach at Louisiana Tech; Butch Jones, who honestly, was the most accomplished head coach since Majors hired at Tennessee and Jeremy Pruitt, who had never been a head coach before.
When Tennessee announces their next coach, which I think will happen next week, I think all the doom and gloomers in the media are going to flip their takes and be praising Tennessee for making a great football hire and pairing him with a great AD.
And, by the way, I love the quiet way Tennessee conducted its AD search. No real leaks, no wild rumors, just an orderly process that led to a very solid hire. So far, the same thing has been true of the head coach search as well.
Which is why I think good news is coming for Tennessee fans early next week.
All That and a Bag of Mail – OutKick
