Serious question for discussion. We have had some bad head coaches in recent years and Pruitt is as in over his head as any of them. As bad as the head coaches have been, we have had some absolute head scratching activity at ALL levels of the UT administration. Some examples in no particular order.....The Pruitt extension after losing to GA State and BYU. The hiring of Derek Dooley. The hiring of Currie. The hiring of Beverly Davenport. The fumbling of Currie's coaching hire. The Butch Jones extension. And of course now the lack of ability to make a decision that leaves the head coach in limbo and guarantees no chance of any success next year. There are many other examples, but you get the point. I'm in no way condoning the job that ANYBODY has done at UT in the last decade. I'd like to raise the topic of who is doing more damage? HC or Admin?
There are a few ways to look at this. I think ultimately it's the administration, but Tennessee's situation is a bizarre one to unravel.
We have not had a really great AD since Dickey. That is obvious. While Fulmer was coach, Mike Hamilton was a bean counter and a fundraising man. He and Fulmer seemed to be able to get on the same page in that regard, but when Hamilton pulled the trigger on Fulmer his only problem was that he did not make Kiffin's contract more restrictive to dissuade USC from coming and poaching him more. By the time they got down to him on their list they were desperate, so it may not have mattered, but his contract was weak on protections for UT. They just didn't think he was going anywhere when he was hired, and they didn't have a plan for replacing him. Hamilton messed up by not just naming Kippy Brown as an interim coach for a year and taking time to find a competent replacement. We got rejected by several candidates, and he just scrambled and hired Dooley. Hamilton also bungled the end of Bruce Pearl's tenure, so that was another major flop.
Following Hamilton, we hired Bama Dave Hart with his "level of information and level of expertise that no one else has." He didn't fire Dooley after year 2, and then seemed to still not have a plan once he was fired. This gave us Jones. Oh, and when Counzo left, he seemingly didn't vet Donny Tindall at all, which continued the spiral of Tennessee basketball. Now, he did luck into Rick Barnes, but at the time no one could have predicted the success we are having right now in that regard.
Up until this point we also had upper administrators that undervalued athletics. Both DiPietro and Jimmy Cheek wanted to turn UT into a research university, and they saw athletics as a hindrance to that goal. Alabama has demonstrated that the two HAVE to work in consort with one another for real success to be achieved at a large public Southern university.
After Bama Dave left, we hired John Currie, and that was the result of the closed-door power struggle amongst our big money boosters. There were other AD candidates out there that the administration just didn't choose. At the time President DiPietro was on his last legs, and his replacement of Jimmy Cheek with Chancellor Davenport was a poor choice. Currie and Davenport gave us the worst coaching search of all time, leading to both of their terminations and we have ended up with Randy Boyd, Donde Plowman, and Phillip Fulmer.
Unfortunately, I think that Boyd, Plowman and Fulmer all have a unified goal of making football great, but they picked the wrong coach. If you look at the investment in athletics at UT, it is at an extremely solid level. Pruitt has been given everything he has asked for. They have built a new weight room, a third full length practice field for him when asked, given him enormous pools to choose from for staff and assistant coaches, and supplied the third largest recruiting budget in the country. They just have the wrong trigger man at the helm.
Still, the dysfunction of the administration over the past 15+ years has been a comedy of errors.
All that said, if they picked a winning coach at any of these prior junctures we could have had results.
