Dooley is clearly not the answer for our proud UT football program. Anyone who was at Athens today, as I was, witnessed an embarrassment from start to finish. Our team was clearly not prepared to play mentally. Our defense was toyed with. Simms continues to take sacks when he needs to throw it away. He has 23 sacks in the last 4 games. We had 9 net yards rushing against a team that had only one 1 game halfway into the season.
Lack of depth was not the reason we got behind 17-0 in the first quarter. Lack of mental preparedness lost this game. Turnovers are part of lack of mental discipline. We are not a well-coached team.
Our defensive schemes are bad. Why would you go with an all-out blitz on 2 & 10, as we did in this game, & FAIL to go with any blitz at all on 4th & 14 in the LSU game?
The learning curve for both Dooley & Wilcox from the WAC to the SEC is too great. Neither is capable of doing their jobs at this level. Neither is Simms. Bray, with all his shortcomings, has a much quicker release & has the potential to be just as accurate & good if he is given the coaching & playing time.
We need to sink or swim with Bray starting now. He is the future. We also need to be signing a topflight QB in this class. Wilcox needs to be canned at the end of the season or maybe even now. He is a failed experiment. Dooley will prove to be a mistake. We can't fire him now but he also will ultimately have to go, & sooner rather than later would be best for UT.
We are on our way to the worst season in Tennessee history. Central Florida crushed UAB, which we miraculously barely beat & needed an OT to do it, despite having only 10 men on the field 3 plays in a row as they were critically driving on us that we never noticed at all. (The referee pointed it out to Reveiz, who relayed it to the clueless coaches on the sideline & in the press box.) Our "7-3-3" defense at LSU has become a national laughingstock. Our coaches lost that game after our players overachieved & then failed to take sufficient blame for the loss, despite their 6-figure & 7-figure salaries of our money they're undeservedly taking.
Patience is a virtue, but patience won't cure incompetence. Dooley, Wilcox, & Simms weren't ready for prime time & probably will never be. Spurrier would've come to Tennessee when we hired Kiffin & also when we hired Dooley had we only seriously approached him. He is a REAL coach, as he proved today. If he had UT's resources, he would've far exceeded his accomplishments at SC. Certainly he would've come when he left the NFL, which is when we should've replaced Fulmer.
Tennessee has never lost 8 games in a season. We will struggle to avoid that fate this year. The way we're playing, Memphis will make their season & beat us on their field. We are running the extreme risk of going 2-10. We have sufficient talent to win all of our November games, but it is doubtful we will, & it is now virtually impossible for us to win any of our October games. We are irrelevant not only nationally but in our own division of our league at a time that Florida has their worst team in 2 decades.
Had we not rescued Dooley & hired him, he would've been let go after another underachieving season at Louisiana Tech. Had we not rescued & hired Kiffin, he would probably be unemployed now. We kept Fulmer at least 3 seasons too long & maybe as many as 7 seasons too long.
Maybe our new UT president that will be named by the end of this month will fix this mess & start by firing our AD that has made all of these unwise moves, including hiring maybe the worst baseball coaches in the SEC.
Dooley's only resume is that he had a father who was a successful SEC coach in a bygone era, was a protege of Saban who never really had any topflight responsibility on Saban's college staff at LSU or pro staff at Miami, & was a mediocre coach at Louisiana Tech. How does that qualify him to be UT's coach? So far, it appears his hiring was a desperation mistake.
ur avatar!
