It was in a better place until the second he announced that he was leaving and taking his two most important assistants with him. Dooley's done a pretty good job salvaging this recruiting class so far, but there's still going to be a hit, both this year and next. On defense, we've gone from John Chavis to NFL legend Monte Kiffin to.....somebody's linebackers coach, I guess. The point on the calendar at which he dumped us means that we had to roll the dice on a guy who had a sub-.500 record at LA Tech as our head coach. Before Kiffin announced his resignation, this was clearly a program on the rise, and one that could expect to compete for the SEC championship within a year or two, but now there are a pantload of questions everywhere.
I suppose the germane question is whether the program was better off on the day Kiffin announced his resignation than it was the day he was hired, and I'd still have to say no. He was hired immediately after the season when there were still other reasonably good choices available; he left us in mid-January when there was little doubt that we'd end up having to settle on a longshot to replace him. He burned up some of the value of the Tennessee brand. He aggressively kicked guys off the team, which was one thing when it was his own problem, but now it just puts the next guy in a real bind w/r/t the roster. Chavis was still on staff when Kiffin was hired, and now we've got nothing. We are worse off right now than we were when Fulmer was hauled off the field on November 29 last year. It looked like a quick rebuild then. It looks like a long project now.