hmanvolfan
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to much sun with no water is not a good thing.So the recruiting field was pretty level, right? With Neyland Stadium, being in the SEC and tradition should the Big Orange have achieved more SEC and National titles since the General was here? Did Fulmer and other coaches get high powered recruits and when they did were they coached to their best potential?
Spurrier whipped Fulmer like a rented mule during his stint at Florida. Also, while the SEC was clearly the best conference in football, it was nowhere near as tough of a conference then as it is now.I mean Fulmer was pretty dang good.
You have to remember that 20 years ago recruiting was more limited to your back yard. You didn’t have a Bama/Clemson type situation where two teams were clearly on top for 5 years+, the landscape was much more even.
Always being in the Top 10, winning the natty, that symbolized being on top before modern day recruiting. With all the recruitment sites and satellite camps and whatnot today, the 5* in Washington is up for grabs for Bama if they want him. 20 years ago they wouldn’t have even heard of him, hence the dynasty effect we have today.
Spurrier whipped Fulmer like a rented mule during his stint at Florida. Also, while the SEC was clearly the best conference in football, it was nowhere near as tough of a conference then as it is now.
Spurrier whipped Fulmer like a rented mule during his stint at Florida. Also, while the SEC was clearly the best conference in football, it was nowhere near as tough of a conference then as it is now.
Fulmer made Spurrier and cry and quit. In 2001, the Gators were on their way to the National Championship game and the game vs UT in Gainesville in December was touted as the biggest game in Florida Field history. The Gators were 2 TD favorites and the Vols physically whipped them and won. Spurrier was so heartbroken, he quit and went on to be a failure in the NFL before he quit and returned to the SEC and became a mediocre coach at South Carolina where he later quit again a week or so he was to come to Knoxville and take another beating from Butch Jones.
Except for 1998, I disagree on all counts, you can't compare how "tough" a conference was because everything was relative. The 90s was a huge transformation for College Football, probably the most entertaining decade of College football, and the beginning of the end of that type of football, to me, College Football has become stale as a dry piece of toast compared to the 90s.Spurrier whipped Fulmer like a rented mule during his stint at Florida. Also, while the SEC was clearly the best conference in football, it was nowhere near as tough of a conference then as it is now.
Spurrier whipped Fulmer like a rented mule during his stint at Florida. Also, while the SEC was clearly the best conference in football, it was nowhere near as tough of a conference then as it is now.
I think the General's greatest contribution in WW 2 was his being assigned to the supply base snafu that was Calcutta, India and turning it completely around and consequently making the defeat of the Japanese in that theater happen.Phil Fulmer is a first time Hall of Fame coach who had a record of 152-52 and won a National title. He put together the greatest staff in UT history and had the respect of his players and everyone in the coaching fraternity. He did have a couple of bad years much like Neyland had in the late 40s and a weak AD listened to the negative idiots and fired him. How's that worked out for you?
Doug Dickey built the Tennessee program up to be the best program in the SEC even in the middle of the Paul Bryant era at Alabama. If Dickey had stayed at UT, the Vols were on their way to dominating the 70s. Instead, the UT AD (Woodruff) in a move that only Mike Hamilton would have been proud of, hired a 28 year old position coach who openly talked of his disdain of recruiting......and it showed as soon as Dickey's recruits graduated.
That's 2 pretty good examples of coaches who were well respected and successful in NCAA football. But, to your original point, Neyland is in the conversation of the greatest coach in NCAA history. Half of his games (not wins, games) ended with his defense pitching a shutout.
Only a handful of programs have ever had a coach with the success Neyland had. Not to mention, during the height of his success, Neyland had to go to northern Africa and defeat the Nazis in that part of the world. No other NCAA program has a coach who was undefeated against the Nazis as a General.
Are you saying that since we haven’t had the football equivalent of arguably the greatest women’s b-ball coach in history, that we haven’t had any top notch football coaches in 65-70 years? I don’t get the scale of this question at all, but I’ll answer it......Barnhill, Wyatt,Dickey, Majors and Fulmer were all top-notch coaches imo. Those guys were a combined 395-183-18 with multiple SEC COY awards, SEC titles and a couple national titles. I’m not sure of your definition of “top-notch”, but I’m thinking each of those guys were, even if they didn’t win 80+% of their games and 7-8 national titles each.Here is an off season topic to explore: has Tennessee had a top notch football coach since General Neyland was on the field? Anybody on the level that Coach Summitt was for women’s basketball?