Last month, The Athletic published a story about the time more than a decade ago when Tennessee nearly replaced one coaching legend with another. However, instead of hiring Gary Patterson to succeed Phil Fulmer, the Vols hired Lane Kiffin and ushered in a carousel of coaches that have teamed up to produce the worst decade in program history.
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So what other “what ifs” are out there for Tennessee during the past decade? Plenty could have changed Tennessee’s fortunes for the better, but as hard as it is to believe, the past decade could have been worse, too.
The butterfly effect always makes it difficult to be certain of the impact of any single action, but I took a stab at projecting what each might have meant for the future. Feel free to offer your own input in the comments on how these scenarios play out.
1. What if Tennessee beats LSU in the 2007 SEC title game and buys Phil Fulmer a little more time?
Had Fulmer lost his fastball after his first losing season in 2005? Plenty believed his best days were behind him, despite bouncing back and winning nine games in 2006. In 2007, Tennessee held the SEC East tiebreaker over eventual Sugar Bowl champion Georgia, which finished No. 2 in the final polls. The Vols booked their trip to Atlanta, but they lost to eventual national champion LSU, 21-14.
A year later, the Vols went 5-7 for a second losing season in four years and Fulmer was out.
It’s one thing to dismiss a coach who hasn’t won the SEC in a decade. It’s much harder to dismiss a coach who hasn’t won the SEC in, uh, 12 months. Fulmer wanted more time and didn’t get it. Instead, Tennessee hired Kiffin, who started 2-3 in his lone season on Rocky Top and finished 7-6 after winning four of the final five regular-season games.
Kiffin brought a loaded staff with him that included future head coaches Ed Orgeron and Frank Wilson and defensive legend Monte Kiffin, who is often credited with creating the Tampa 2.
It’s doubtful Tennessee’s record is vastly different with Fulmer in charge, rather than Year 1 of the Kiffin Era, but at least the Vols would have avoided the dreaded “three coaches in three seasons” scenario, which at the very least, is an improvement.
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And brings us to our next hypothetical …
2. What if Pete Carroll sticks around in Los Angeles?
Carroll always said he saw himself staying at USC forever. But looming NCAA storm clouds have a way of altering college football coaches’ plans. When Carroll left for the Seattle Seahawks, Kiffin was the natural fit to slide into his dream job 2,000 miles away. He took it and incited what I’ll call “unrest” on campus.
Again, Carroll’s exit precipitated Tennessee’s run of three head coaches in three years, but it didn’t have to be that way. Kiffin has made plenty of mistakes and piled up detractors, but he was the most accomplished coach Tennessee hired in the last decade before he took the Tennessee job and he’s done more after he left Tennessee than any of the men who succeeded him. He is an objectively better coach than Derek Dooley or Butch Jones.
It’s safe to say his results on Rocky Top would have been better than his successors, and he’d have continued tweaking his SEC coaching peers at every stop along the way, cultivating an us-against-the-world mentality in Knoxville.
3. What if Tennessee doesn’t hit the panic button?
The forgotten factor in Kiffin’s hiring? It happened on Jan. 12, 2010, just a few weeks before signing day and long after the coaching carousel usually slows down. Jeremy Pruitt was hired on Dec. 6. Butch Jones was hired on Dec. 7.
There was no home-run candidate in play, and after whiffing on Utah’s Kyle Whittingham, Tennessee hired Derek Dooley on Jan. 15, rather than handing the job to an interim coach and spending a season drumming up interest and making a game plan for a game-changing, paradigm-shifting hire at the end of the year. Dooley had a modest coaching resume compared to others who take hold of blue-blooded jobs, and he served as his own athletic director at Louisiana Tech, where he went 17-20 and parlayed a 4-8 season in 2009 into the Tennessee head coaching job. He dealt with a thinned-out roster from all the coaching turnover, but the Vols would have been better positioned to make a big hire a year later, rather than the rushed job that landed them a candidate who never accomplished a winning season in his forgettable three-year run.
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4. What if Dooley hires Lance Thompson instead of Sal Sunseri after the 2011 season?
Jim Chaney’s 2012 offense averaged 6.42 yards per play, good for 19th nationally and third in the SEC, behind only Alabama and Georgia. However, the Vols’ 2012 defense gave up 40 points per game in SEC play, which ranked 114th nationally among teams in conference games. It was an obvious Achilles’ heel and eventually a huge reason why Dooley was fired before the season ended.
When future Cal head coach Justin Wilcox left after the 2011 season, Dooley ended up hiring Sunseri away from Alabama, where he served as linebackers coach and assistant head coach the previous three seasons. He hadn’t, however, coordinated a defense since 1999 at Alabama A&M.
Some wanted Dooley to promote Thompson, then the defensive line coach, from within. He didn’t get the job and instead replaced Sunseri coaching linebackers at Alabama.
Does Tennessee’s defense perform better with a more familiar voice on the headset? Does that mean an improved season in 2012 and an extended stay for Dooley at Tennessee?
5. What if Tennessee had wrestled Charlie Strong away from Louisville or, gulp, landed its freckle-faced white whale, Jon Gruden, rather than Butch Jones?
Passing on Patterson in favor of Kiffin is soaked in nothing but pure regret. This conversation is a little more complicated. Gruden’s name has surfaced for this job enough times to produce its own near-annual hashtag, #Grumors. Last year, he did what so many people said he would never do and left the Monday Night Football broadcast booth to take the Oakland Raiders’ job. His radical roster turnover has earned him plenty of skeptics in his first 18 months on the job, as did his 4-12 record in his first year.
Strong won a BCS bowl at Louisville and turned 23 wins in two seasons into the Texas job after the 2013 season. He was a poor fit for a number of reasons, and after three losing seasons, Strong was shown the door in Austin. Now, at USF, his program has been passed by its biggest rival, UCF. And the Bulls went just 7-6 in 2018 after a 10-win debut.
Jones gave the program a pair of nine-win seasons, but those could also be colored as underachievements relative to the talent on the rosters, and he left the program in shambles at the end of 2017, overseeing the worst season in school history.
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Does Gruden or Strong ever win 10 games at Tennessee? That’s definitely up for debate. But does either of them leave the program in worse shape than Jones? I’d argue probably not for Strong, but that scenario is on the table for Gruden, who last coached college football at a program (Pacific) that hasn’t existed since 1995. And he was there six years before that.
6. What if Josh Dobbs had signed with Arizona State?
Dobbs committed to the Sun Devils in June 2012 but flipped to Tennessee on Signing Day 2013 as a four-star, top-150 national prospect. He left campus in possession of numerous school records and carried the Vols through the most successful period of the past decade, a 25-14 run from 2013-15 that featured three wins in mid-level bowl games but no other meaningful hardware.
That’s not on Dobbs, who did everything you could ask of a player and left as one of the most beloved players in school history. But his excellence did mask much of the program’s rotting foundation, the bottom of which fell out in 2017 after Dobbs left for the NFL.
No Vols team from 2013-15 gets close to nine wins without Dobbs. But is rock bottom on the back end a little less dramatic if the cracks in the foundation were more obvious in the middle of Jones’ tenure, rather than being laid bare in one endless, miserable season?
7. What if Tennessee beats South Carolina and Vanderbilt in 2016?
Those losses left a bitter taste in every Vol fan’s mouth, and even with nine wins, branded 2016 as a disappointment. It’s hard to argue otherwise.
Pair that with the parade of midseason exits, and fans were frustrated. But win those two extremely winnable games, and Tennessee gets to Atlanta for the first time since 2007 and maxes out its potential. That disappointment is gone. It’s very easy to sell 2016 as a tangible step forward. Without Dobbs, 2017 can be sold as a rebuilding year. Jones would have faced heat, but he might have survived and attempted to rebuild.
If Tennessee wins those two games, it’s entirely possible that Jones is still Tennessee’s head coach. Of course, it’s equally possible he goes 5-7 or 4-8 in 2018 and gets fired, giving Tennessee a new coach heading into 2019.
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But when Jones left fans and boosters as frustrated as he did with 2016’s shortcomings, he never had a chance to make it through a winless SEC season in 2018, especially one where his team looked ready to give up on multiple occasions.
It’s also worth asking what happens if Jones is a little better at managing coaches and players? Jalen Hurd and Preston Williams left and had huge success at other programs. Jauan Jennings was dismissed. Dozens of other players left the program in less public manners. But even with the lack of development in the program, what does Tennessee look like if it doesn’t have the kind of constant attrition that marked the Jones era?
8. What if Tennessee meets with Dan Mullen quickly after the 2017 season and hires him?
In the past decade, Tennessee has never been more nationally relevant than it was for a weekend in 2017. That weekend also coincided with one of the most embarrassing sagas in school history, regardless of what one believes about Greg Schiano or John Currie. It highlighted the discord within the university and athletic department, and if Tennessee moves quickly on Mullen, it’s entirely possible that episode is erased from history.
At the end of the 2017 season, Chip Kelly was the hottest name to take over the Florida job, and Mullen was privately doubtful he’d ever get a chance to go back to Florida, where he helped Urban Meyer win a pair of national titles. It was a perfect time for Mullen to leave Mississippi State, and if Tennessee moves before Florida, the odds of landing Mullen were very high.
That, however, introduces an interesting comparison between Mullen and Pruitt. A more experienced head coach probably has a little less bumpy first year, and Mullen’s track record means his floor is much higher than Pruitt, who is still very unproven. But considering Pruitt’s road of success at every stop thus far, it’s very easy to argue Pruitt’s ceiling is higher still right now, even as Mullen takes a top-10 Florida team into the 2019 preseason.
9. What if Currie doesn’t fly to the west coast and go AWOL for seven hours?
More than just mismanaging the coaching search in 2017, Currie’s cross-country flight to meet with Mike Leach after visiting Dave Doeren left him out of the loop during a crucial, difficult time with the university. He fell through the thin ice he’d been standing on, and Fulmer replaced him.
But what if Currie talks angry administrators and boosters into keeping him as athletic director? Tennessee’s coaching search would have been far more interesting than the quick, simple, football-centric approach Fulmer took, but I can guarantee at least one thing: The Vols wouldn’t have a pair of million-dollar coordinators like they do right now.
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10. What if Leach or Schiano was Tennessee’s head coach?
Leach would be tremendously entertaining, albeit a poor fit at Tennessee. For the first time in his career, he’d be working in a fishbowl job, rather than at a program that operates at the geographical and financial margins of a power conference. He feels a lot more at home in that space as an underdog.
And that’s to say nothing of his true Air Raid approach and trying to implement it at a place like Tennessee. While many of his mentees like Lincoln Riley and Dana Holgorsen have embraced the running game, Leach is still liable to cast it aside in favor of a chuck-and-duck approach. Who doesn’t want to see that? But it doesn’t strike me as a winning long-term strategy at Tennessee.
And Schiano? How rare is it to see a coach take over at a place where a large portion of the fan base has open disdain for him? Schiano would be an uninspiring hire from a football perspective, and he was not considered to serve as Ohio State’s interim coach during Meyer’s suspension last fall. He left to be Bill Belichick’s defensive coordinator, but he resigned in March to spend more time on his faith and with his family.
The dynamic between Schiano and Tennessee fans if the Vols had actually gone through with his hiring would have been the most fascinating in all of college football.
(Top photo of Lane Kiffin: Joe Murphy / Getty Images)