Most Over/Underrated Vol Coach

#52
#52
Kylo said:
Typical Majors talk. Majors let the game pass him by. He was too conservative. He singlehandedly killed the 92 season after such a great start. The funny thing is that Fulmer ended up letting the game pass him by as well.

Majors fired himself with the booze and the 3 yards and a cloud of dust offense.
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Can’t disagree with you but I still feel like Majors got hosed. PF for whatever reason……got a pass. Have a great day. Go Vols.
 
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#53
#53
Kylo said:
Typical Majors talk. Majors let the game pass him by. He was too conservative. He singlehandedly killed the 92 season after such a great start. The funny thing is that Fulmer ended up letting the game pass him by as well.

Majors fired himself with the booze and the 3 yards and a cloud of dust offense.
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Seems to me that both, Majors and Fulmer, had similar problems at the end of their tenure but both had one major commonality. They both lost many games they should have won.

Majors three and a cloud of dust is what got him. That was the old style football of his time. Fulmer stopped playing to win and relying on a late turnover or penalty to win the game for him.
 
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#54
#54
zeppelin128 said:
Underrated: George Cafego

Overrated: Pruitt

Hear me out. Whatever low opinion you have of Pruitt, it ain't low enough.
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Man, I’m right there with you on Pruitt. Billed as a defensive guru and motivator. His teams almost always started the game flat with three and outs on offense, and giving up scores on defense. The only coach since Majors I didn’t see coach a game live, and I’ve never regretted it
 
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#57
#57
jacksonvol24 said:
Head Coaches….

Overrated: Phillip Fulmer. He had great assistant coaches around him that carried him. He also coached when (other than Spurrier) the SEC wasn’t loaded with great coached teams week end and week out. He had great players but couldn’t win like he should have. In reality, he underachieved with one NC. He had teams that should have won at least 3 NC. He also refused to change.

Underrated: Johnny Majors. He came back to Tennessee when we needed him. He brought us back to relevance and had it rolling before an assistant coach made a play for his job. Coached hard, recruited hard and worked hard for every Tennessee fan. Will always be top 3 coaching greats on the Hill for me. Go Vols.
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This is comical
 
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#59
#59
Overrated - Battle, Kiffin

Underrated - Majors, Sanders, Chavis

Battle destroyed what Dickey built and left Johnny with an OVC squad. Battle was Bob Woodruff’s folly and ridiculous “reach” hire.

Kiffin plundered the Fulmer roster with the loyalty of an alley cat only to get fired on the tarmac at USC. Lame left behind a royal mess and was Mike Hamilton’s reach hire.

Majors rebuilt programs 3 times: Iowa State, Pitt and Tennessee. All were rock solid for years after he left and at a historically high level for each program. He inherited the worst program in the SEC by far from Bama Billy.

Sanders was not Cutcliffe but was an excellent assistant as demonstrated after leaving UT and was superb at ETSU. Chavis was a phenomenal developer of talent and motivator. Likewise, he had a nice career after leaving Knoxville.

honorable mention for both categories: Jeremy Pruitt was a superb talent evaluator that left behind some super skill players for Josh Heupel. However he was off the charts in McDonalds bag stupidity and became Fulmers folly. Without UT kicking him out - he could have won 8 games with the returning squad but Vols are far better off with Josh. Pruitt was a terrific evaluator of football talent and had some skills but not at head coach level.
 
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#61
#61
jacksonvol24 said:
Maybe you think it is. Most….thought it was spot on.
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Ya. Fulmer had more wins, less losses, more SEC wins less SEC losses, more top 5 finishes, more top 10 finishes, more top 15 finishes, more season with 2 or less losses. Every majors “won” the SEC he lost to the team that was tied in first… except in 1990 when he beat Florida but had a worse record. Oh and fulmer won a national title.

Yet you call one overrated and the other underrated. Make it make sense
 
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#62
#62
jacksonvol24 said:
Maybe you think it is. Most….thought it was spot on.
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No, "most" didn't.

This thread has been read somewhere around 3,000 times. Out of thousands, a dozen or so people liked your take. Congratulations, you have discovered the anti-Fulmer cabal in our fan base. They'll like anything that praises Johnny and/or insults Fulmer.

It's like an Al Qu'eda dude thinking the world agree with him because a dozen of his fellow terrorists send him a Valentine card.

Don't get me wrong; I like Johnny. But he is in no way under-rated. Quite the contrary; we usually lift him up quite high, higher than his record would justify.

Go Vols!
 
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#63
#63
05_never_again said:
I think labeling Phil has "overrated" also has to do with his tenure as AD, which was an unmitigated disaster.

If you wanted to say that his overall tenure at Tennessee, in all capacities, is kind of mixed, I think that is fair. Even though he did win our only modern era national title. You've got the first half of his tenure as HC, which was great, but you've got to balance it with the second half of his HC tenure/the condition of the program when he left, plus his time as AD.
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No, I base it on 2003 to 2008. With the talent he had that record was dismal.
 
#64
#64
sami said:
Totally agree with this. I was at UT during a time when Majors had some incredible talent (Reggie White, Willie Gault, Bill Bates, Mike Cofer, Reggie McKenzie, Fuad Reveiz) and underachieved in a big way, getting bowl eligible but not much beyond that. Really, '85, '87, and '89 were his only great teams in 15 full seasons.

But he did give us Bama '82 and the '85 Sugar Bowl, and he was a VFL.
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His first 4 years were a wreck because there was absolutely no talent on the board when he took over in 1977. I think we had one lineman on the roster greater than 240 pounds. This was not a SEC level program when he took over. Not like when Fulmer took over coming off 3 SEC championships in the last 6 years.
 
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#65
#65
Smokey123 said:
Ya. Fulmer had more wins, less losses, more SEC wins less SEC losses, more top 5 finishes, more top 10 finishes, more top 15 finishes, more season with 2 or less losses. Every majors “won” the SEC he lost to the team that was tied in first… except in 1990 when he beat Florida but had a worse record. Oh and fulmer won a national title.

Yet you call one overrated and the other underrated. Make it make sense
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And what top program hired this great coach you speak of when he left UT? There are reasons that did not happen.
 
#66
#66
onevol74 said:
And what top program hired this great coach you speak of when he left UT? There are reasons that did not happen.
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That’s irrelevant. I’m not saying he was or wasn’t overrated. I’m saying it’s comical to say Majors was underrated and Fulmer was overrated. Its asinine. If fulmer is overrated majors is even more overrated. Everyone considers majors to be one of the UT goats, plenty even have him above fulmer. So if fulmer is overrated and he was much better than majors… how on earth would majors be underrated?
 
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#67
#67
onevol74 said:
His first 4 years were a wreck because there was absolutely no talent on the board when he took over in 1977. I think we had one lineman on the roster greater than 240 pounds. This was not a SEC level program when he took over. Not like when Fulmer took over coming off 3 SEC championships in the last 6 years.
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First 4??? He had 1 9 win season in his first 8 seasons

His SEC championship where he lost to all the teams he was tied with? Except for Florida… where he had a worse record but still got crowned champs somehow
 
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#68
#68
Smokey123 said:
That’s irrelevant. I’m not saying he was or wasn’t overrated. I’m saying it’s comical to say Majors was underrated and Fulmer was overrated. Its asinine. If fulmer is overrated majors is even more overrated. Everyone considers majors to be one of the UT goats, plenty even have him above fulmer. So if fulmer is overrated and he was much better than majors… how on earth would majors be underrated?
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The most interesting part to me is the years after Cutcliff left the program and with the amount of talent we had in the program we could not win any championships. The recruiting we had during those years was as good as any in program history. So coaching was the problem.
 
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#70
#70
onevol74 said:
The most interesting part to me is the years after Cutcliff left the program and with the amount of talent we had in the program we could not win any championships. The recruiting we had during those years was as good as any in program history. So coaching was the problem.
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The game had passed him by and he also hired bad assistants. He still made it to the SEC champ game 3 outta his last 6 years, 4 outta the last 8 with 4 top 15 finishes, which is one less than Majors had in 15 seasons.

Fulmer definitely didn’t live up to the expectations or what we expected after the run in the 90’s but that doesn’t suddenly make him worse than Majors
 
#71
#71
Smokey123 said:
The game had passed him by and he also hired bad assistants. He still made it to the SEC champ game 3 outta his last 6 years, 4 outta the last 8 with 4 top 15 finishes, which is one less than Majors had in 15 seasons.

Fulmer definitely didn’t live up to the expectations or what we expected after the run in the 90’s but that doesn’t suddenly make him worse than Majors
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Correction I forgot Uga won the tie breaker in 03. The point remains tho
 
#73
#73
Majors seemed to win more games than Phil where he was a big underdog- ie ND 79, Bama 82, Auburn 85, Miami 85.
- However, Majors also seemed to have more inexcusable losses to terrible teams.
- Johnny seemed to always be one step forward two steps back. One huge win or season followed by an embarrassing loss or season
- Johnny had a much less talented team to start with that Phil, but he had plenty of time to recruit players and his first elite team was 8 years later.
- Phil’s overall body of work looks much better on paper, but he inherited an elite team and never had to rebuild.
- I don’t remember Phil winning many games where it was a huge upset outside of Florida 01 but he always had talented teams.
- both Phil and Johnny were stubborn at times, played not to lose and got way too conservative and ended losing games they should have won. They were both poor game day coaches with no adjustments at times.
- Phil gets the edge in terms of coaching because he had more success in terms of wins. He had 7-8 really good / elite teams vs 4-5 for Johnny.
- Johnny gets a slight edge as a player and Phil loses a bit with his AD reign.
- it was time for a change at the end of both of their tenures
 
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#74
#74
What most people either do not know or forget is that Majors NC at Pitt was before they put a cap on scholarships. That’s how he was able to get Dorsett and others. When “Johnny came home” their were scholarship caps and he could no longer over recruit.

Add in Bear, Dye, Dooley, (Florida was just loaded with talent regardless of coach) and the SEC was just more difficult back then. (Was there something like 8 schools in the conference?) While we were getting some players from Louisiana, the rest of the south was kinda locked down except a few here and there. Even back then, same as now, when you looked at our rosters, most of the players were from out of state. We, our state, just didn’t have the population demographics as we do now but, the kids we have in state now grew up supporting out of state football programs.
 
#75
#75
jacksonvol24 said:
Head Coaches….

Overrated: Phillip Fulmer. He had great assistant coaches around him that carried him. He also coached when (other than Spurrier) the SEC wasn’t loaded with great coached teams week end and week out. He had great players but couldn’t win like he should have. In reality, he underachieved with one NC. He had teams that should have won at least 3 NC. He also refused to change.

Underrated: Johnny Majors. He came back to Tennessee when we needed him. He brought us back to relevance and had it rolling before an assistant coach made a play for his job. Coached hard, recruited hard and worked hard for every Tennessee fan. Will always be top 3 coaching greats on the Hill for me. Go Vols.
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Interesting that the winningest UT coach in your lifetime, with a winning record over Bama and UGA, is your choice for underrated. What was it like before he was HC and what was it like afterward?
 
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