O-2 vs saban. O-3 vs Meyer. Like 2-5 vs richt. Saban crushed him with a bad bama team.He had the number 5 class in the country, the day he was fired., including, Tajh Boyd and Bryce Petty, the QB that went to Baylor and lit it up. As far has hiring. Nobody can really say Dave Clawson was a bad hire. 11 months on the job. Also 11 months removed from being in Atlanta!
Honestly, everything before universal integration, which I believe was 1972, is too alien of a brand of football to even begin to compare to today's game.To answer your question we need to understand a few things.
First - What constitutes a "powerhouse"? 8-12 wins per year? Number of championships? Number of bowl wins?
Second - To me you must not look at only a good/great period of time. You must look at the overall history of a program.
Third - I think you should leave out the long past history. I would start from say 1950. To me the ability of hearing and then seeing the game from that point is far enough back.
Fourth - The measuring stick. You would need to know the average wins by all "big time teams" per year. Then our own average. Then apply these averages to your definition of powerhouse. Now where does UT fall in this situation. Have we ever been a powerhouse in this equation?
One can hope..
No. The game has changed and it is only going to get more difficult. We should enjoy the wins and winning seasons. I would say give us an average that is between 7-9 wins with the occasional 5 win season and the occasional 10+ winning season and I'll take the next 20 years.
I do not think the 2 issues are correlated. Is UT's attendance going down? That is where future donors will mostly come from. And the fact that middle Tennessee is booming and UT Knoxville is the state's flagship school, I think will continue to grow. I don't think money will be an issue. As far as football succes, if Clemson can have their success, UT can because there are several advantages over Clemson (which is the 2nd most popular school in their state).This is a loaded question, Tennessee has the financial resources to compete and be a powerhouse, but the Vols have lost a generation+ of new Vol fans. This means that over the next 10-20 years they will lose donors. Tennessee has not been viewed as a powerhouse for over a decade now by recruits or coaches. This will continue till UT has strung 3-4 solid winning seasons in a row, which is highly unlikely due to the demonstrated mismanagement of Tennessee's administration. I hope Heupel can be a good coach that can right this program but I fear the deck and odds are greatly stacked against him.
I absolutely believe we can be a powerhouse again. If Clemson can hijack our program and do what they’ve done in 12 years or so then there is no reason we can’t do the same. Bama won’t always be Bama, Clemson will fall off eventually. UGA wasn’t even a contender for the East for the first 10 years of division play . Everything goes in cycles, if we find the right combo of coaches, quarterbacks and playmakers I don’t think it will take as long as others would think.
The main two reasons I think the NCCA is going to make it as hard on us as they can is that 1. In the last two years or so the NCCA has seen its influence and power dimming with the politics of sports in America. They will relish showing what damage they can still do by *****ing on us. 2. The UT administration for the last 25 years has shown that they have no balls to stand up to the NCCA and therefore will do as it has done so many times, they will bend over and drop their drawers and ask the NCCA to please make it easy.Thoughts?
Should we talk about how many games we are giving Huepel until we run him out of town or how Rick Barnes can't recruit?