Tennessee has gone cheap on its last three coaching hires over the past 10 seasons (dating back to Dooley) and the results are exactly what you’d expect:
Zero division championships
Zero top 20 finishes
Five soon (soon to be six) losing seasons
0-9 vs Alabama
1-8 vs Florida
2-7 vs Georgia
4-5 vs Vanderbilt
My God, that’s depressing to type. During that time, we hired three coaches in Dooley, Butch and Pruitt with zero HC experience at the P5 level. Dooley and Butch were spectacular failures (Dooley much more so than Butch), and Pruitt appears to be the same. I see some people around here still defending Pruitt and saying to give him more time....NO. He needs to be gone after this year. He’s had two offseasons to instill his culture and put his mark on this program, and the result of that was getting dominated in the trenches by a 2-10 Sun Belt team and following that up with a embarrassing loss to BYU plagued with mental errors. He is NOT the guy, and the longer we keep him around, the longer we prolong the long road back to relevance. While it’s easy to spend other people’s money, I maintain it’s much more expensive to keep the wrong guy than splurge on hiring the right guy. If you don’t believe me, check out all the empty seats at Neyland for the rest of this season (except for the UGA game, which will probably be 1/3 Dawg fans, if not more). It’s beyond perplexing to me that Tennessee invests gobs of money into building spectacular football facilities and isn’t willing to hire a proven coach who can use those facilities to build an elite program.
We all wished for a guy like Gruden, and while he would’ve been awesome, it was never happening. But our failure to land a Gary Patterson or a Chris Peterson or a Dan Mullen or a Mike Gundy has us where we are today — a national laughingstock. Not only does Pruitt need to be canned in November, but he needs to be replaced with a proven P5 head coach. Don’t worry, I’ve made a list of candidates:
Tier One — Grand Slams
Urban Meyer - I find it hard to believe that his comment about UT being a top ten job last weekend wasn’t calculated, seeing as how he’s one of the most calculating people on the planet. Regardless of your thoughts on him personally, he’s a bona fide winner with three national championships to his name who would immediately have us in the Top 25 and competing for the CFP in year 2 or 3. He’s that good. He’ll turn 56 before next season and I think his “health issues” are BS — I can’t imagine he is actually done and never coaches again. Biggest issue would be we’d most assuredly be behind ND and USC on his wishlist if those jobs were to come open.
Bob Stoops - Another bona fide winner with “health issues,” although given what happened with his dad I do think he may actually be done for good. If not, he’d be an absolute dynamite hire who would immediately turn this program around. He’d be 60 next season.
Brian Kelly - I don’t think Kelly gets enough credit for what he’s done at ND. He transformed that program by going into SEC country and getting the type of guys you need to be competitive nationally. ND is a hard place to recruit compared to other national powers; the leash would be off at UT and I’d take him in a heartbeat. One negative — he’s a complete jackass, worse than Urban. It does seem like there’s rumblings about him and ND not being happy with each other every other year or so, and those rumblings could get louder if ND thinks they can get Urban.
Tier Two - Home Runs
Chris Petersen - Offensive mastermind and simply put one of the best coaches in the country when it comes to doing more with less. I don’t know if he’ll ever move his family from the west coast, and we’ve obviously been turned down by him before, but he’d be a home run hire nonetheless.
David Shaw - The last two years where Stanford has fallen off a bit don’t worry me; he’s another guy who’s won big at a place where it’s VERY hard to do so. I doubt he’d ever leave Stanford for another college job, though.
Gary Patterson - I don’t think he’s ever leaving TCU, but I’ve always wondered what he could do at an powerhouse program with elite facilities that can recruit with anyone, seeing as how he’s consistently whipped better programs with 3-star recruits for 10+ years. We really, really missed out here in 2009 or 2010 or whenever it was.
Tier Three - Well Hit Doubles
Gus Malzahn
Mike Gundy
Matt Rhule
Kyle Whittingham
Bill O’Brien
Tier Four - Better Than Pruitt
Joe Moorhead (might move up a tier if he wins 8+ again this year)
Bronco Mendenhall (moves up a tier with a top 25 finish this year)
Pat Fitzgerald
Mike Leach
Dave Doeren
Steve Addazio
