A lot of folks on here are saying that Butch has been fired...funny, I can't find a single article or statement from UT that says that. We have people who may or may not be insiders claiming that he was fired at different times throughout the year. Still haven't seen anything official. Interesting counterpoint is that some folks who should know are saying that Butch hasn't been fired, that Currie and Davenport don't want to fire him and Haslam doesn't want him fired.
there is a difference between don't want to and won't.
i said it all off season that there's no way they wanted to fire him this year and that if he finished 7-5/8-4 and was competitive, he'd be safe. that for them to fire him, he'd have to basically give them no choice but to do so.
and i think to date, he's done that. the regression is evident, the wins have been very (in some cases, too much so) competitive, and the losses have not been.
and we've lost to teams that are hard to ignore. and the margins to the others are hard to ignore. you can't be in year 5 and lose by 80+ points to two of your biggest rivals. you're not even competitive. and the gap, at least on paper, looks to be as wide as it was when he took the job. that's not good enough.
with 5 losses already, winless in the SEC, and games against two bottom feeders and a 2nd tier LSU team, 7 or 8 losses are not off the table, and given the offensive woes, it's likely to not look pretty either. i think the best we can do now is 6-6, and i'm not sure that happens.
i don't think he's still employed today to have the chance at saving his job. i think he's still employed today because there's nothing good to come of having a search going on in the middle of the season when you can't really hire anyone right now anyway.
and if he's employed until a certain date in december, i believe, the buyout goes down. it could also be to allow Jones and his agent time to test the market and see if there are going to be openings he's in the running for, also beneficial for TN financially, and could allow more resources to be used to hire the next guy.
and i'm not necessarily convinced that they're not firing him now so they can announce his dismissal and then announce the replacement in fairly short order....and eliminate that speculation time of who would be the replacement, and all the reporting on who's been contacted, who's declined interest, who's said no etc, etc, etc....we've been down that road before and it's not good either. we've fired Fulmer and Dooley early in the season and it didn't net us any advantage in finding their replacements, and it actually hurt us more perception wise as more and more information was made public about how bad both of those searches went....and the search after Kiffin wasn't pretty either.
and i do think Fulmer is in Currie's ear about how to handle this. good or bad, i think that's influencing him a bit as well.
the only real sin here is if there's really nothing going on behind the scenes. and i just can't get myself to believe that's the case.
i've seen no evidence that the players have quit, and though the season is shot, they at least have 4 games left to see if they can get anything together to go out on some positive note, even if it's a bowl game in Birmingham, Memphis or Shreveport. fire him after the Vandy game, let the interim coach the bowl, if there is one, and sometime in between that, you announce who the next coach is....i think that's probably the best of both worlds here....i think it i's more likely that we miss a bowl and a new coach is announced in the first week/10 days of December....i hope anyway.
the only thing i will say is if Currie hires a dud, how this was handled will come back to bite him...but even then, it's still about who's hired more than anything else.
