John Currie: Everything About Hire Shows UT Vols Utter Incompetence

The Tennessee Volunteers introduced new Athletic Director John Currie on Thursday. Everything about the hire shows the administration is incompetent.

If you could design a more pathetic, idiotic, incompetent way to handle a hire, it could not go worse than the University of Tennessee administration’s process in bringing in new Athletic Director John Currie.

In case you missed it, University of Tennessee Chancellor Dr. Beverly J. Davenport introduced Currie late Thursday afternoon. With that alone, the Vols already made a mistake.

The Tennessee Lady Vols were just coming off of an SEC Tournament game against the Alabama Crimson Tide. Why in the world would the administration schedule a press conference that could coincide, and it did, with a postseason game involving one of the school’s three most important athletic programs?

But that’s just a small hint of the administration’s utter incompetence.

Let’s go back to everything we read in the bombshell Jimmy Hyams dropped on Gridiron Report before the press conference.

Most disturbing in the report is that Jimmy Haslam reportedly pushed for John Currie. The fact that Haslam was even on the search committee was a problem.

This is the same Jimmy Haslam who owns the Cleveland Browns, the worst franchise in the NFL. He has a reputation for making awful hires for that franchise.

So we’re supposed to trust a guy who can’t hire the right executive to keep his NFL franchise from being the worst in the league to make the right decision for the Vols’ athletic program?

Also, Haslam being on the search committee should be a conflict of interest. His brother, Bill Haslam, is Tennessee’s governor, and he’s involved in a decision to hire a public state employee?

Then there’s the 2013 fraud scheme that his family business was involved in along with the reports that same year that his company was in billions of dollars of debt.

In what universe, with all of this, should anybody trust Haslam’s judgment? He fits the trifecta of a terrible decision-maker: utter incompetence, conflicts of interest, and connections to corruption.

Only an incompetent administration would think he uses good judgment. So far, the University of Tennessee fits that bill under Chancellor Davenport.

Let’s also stick with the search committee to discuss its utter failure. Hyams reported some members were not aware that Currie, while at Tennessee back in 2008, was instrumental in Phillip Fulmer’s firing.

Seriously?

The university put together a search committee specifically to thoroughly vet each candidate. How could members of that committee manage to miss an important detail like that? A 10-year old tasked with studying Currie’s record would learn that fact.

It took a quick Twitter search for me to learn that Currie had a role in firing Fulmer.

But among a group of professionals closely tied to the university thoroughly vetting Currie, that never came up? You missed a crucial detail involving a hall of fame coach at the institution that hired you?

Speaking of Fulmer, Hyams’s report Fulmer wanted the AD job to keep Currie from getting it is not a scandal. An old coach’s feelings about the future of a program is irrelevant, no matter how successful the coach was. So the committee is off the hook for that.

But they are not off the hook, if the reports are true, for how they treated Fulmer.

Hyams’s report that the committee led Fulmer to believe he had the AD job Monday before hiring Currie Tuesday is awful. That is no way to treat a legend with the program.

And it showed. Fulmer was not one of the legendary UT figures in the audience for the press conference Thursday. That’s a hideous look for the program.

Before we go further, if you so want to torture yourself with self-congratulating incompetence from that press conference, you can watch the full video here.

So moving beyond the decision to hold the press conference, if you watched it, you know the opening was a disaster. At one point in the introduction, Chancellor Davenport named the members of the search committee, a group everybody hates right now.

She stopped when she mentioned Peyton Manning, the one guy people probably love, and decided to go on a tangent about how great Manning was.

Then, clearly trying to sell the fact that he was part of the committee that supported this terrible hire, she made this idiotic quote:

"“Someone wrote just last week, ‘If you do anything that people don’t like, just tell them that you love Peyton Manning.’ So, I’m here today to tell you, I love Peyton Manning, and I’m going to keep loving Peyton Manning!”"

Congratulations chancellor! You stand in line with just about every other person who has ever been a Tennessee fan that is still alive. They weren’t all tasked with finding the best person to lead the athletic department, though.

Everything About John Currie Hire Shows Incompetence in the Tennessee Vols Administration

By Caleb Calhoun | Mar 2, 2017

The Tennessee Volunteers introduced new Athletic Director John Currie on Thursday. Everything about the hire shows the administration is incompetent.