Butch Jones was good for Tennessee football, but he needs to go

Tennessee football Butch Jones helped restore the program in a lot of ways. But it’s time for the Volunteers to cut bait with him.

I don’t say this in a good riddance way. Nor do I say it in a demeaning way. But Butch Jones and Tennessee football need to go their separate ways. Saturday was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Jones has done numerous good things for the Vols. He has restored recruiting to where it once was. He continued Derek Dooley‘s efforts to clean up a mess that the athletic department was left with. And he stocked the cupboard with talent.

But he has come up short too often now for anybody to believe he can take the Vols to the next level. As much as I hate to agree with Clay Travis, he was right about this one. Jones is a career nine-win coach.

He’s an 8-4 guy who has had one 10-win season in his 10 years as head coach. And nobody believes that this year, his 11th year, he will get to 10 wins.

There are so many things wrong with Tennessee football’s 41-0 loss to Georgia Saturday that we don’t know where to begin. You can just go to our Twitter page @allfortennessee to see all the criticisms of X’s and O’s we had. But that’s not the only story.

Jones was going up against Kirby Smart, who is just in his second year with the Dawgs. Now, to be fair, Smart inherited a much better situation that Jones did at Tennessee. But Jones is in his fifth year.

He should be on the same level as Smart at minimum. Did anybody see that Saturday? Of course not. But it gets worse.

This was Tennessee’s worst loss in Knoxville since 1905.

So how do you explain Jones overseeing the most embarrassing performance Tennessee football has suffered ever since it was a relevant program? Think of all the bad years and teams you’ve witnessed from the Vols, especially in recent years.

None of them managed to lose a game in this embarrassing of a fashion.

This is all just the micro-perspective. Let’s go to the macro-perspective.

We’ve discussed all the issues of Jones’s in-game management. That didn’t apply today because the game was such a blowout.

But one of the reasons you could forgive his in-game blunders like what he did against Florida two weeks ago was because you felt he had put together a program that could at least compete with anybody now.

That wasn’t the case Saturday. Against another Top 10 team, his group fell apart, just like they did last year against the Alabama Crimson Tide.

Another macro perspective is what Jones inherited. Perhaps we ignored the warning signs of him going 7-6 his second year. Almost all great coaches got to nine wins by their second year with a school.

We noted Jones’s short stick and the situation he inherited. But honestly, his predecessor had a much shorter stick to fight with than he has.

Jones came to the Tennessee as the East was falling apart.

When Dooley came to Knoxville, the SEC East still had Urban Meyer, and he dealt with Mark Richt all three years.

Also, in 2011, he drew the LSU Tigers, Alabama Crimson Tide and Arkansas Razorbacks from the West when they finished the season as the Top Three ranked teams in the nation, lost his quarterback for half the season due to injury, and was still dealing with the fallout of the Lane Kiffin recruiting scandals.

Nobody can say Jones coached any year with as difficult a situation Dooley had that year.

One of the final straws, though, is that Jones and his staff have not developed talent. Name one player on this roster who looks better than he did when you first saw him.

You can’t.

Sure, Joshua Dobbs looked great playing for Tennessee football. But he was just the absolute perfect fit for Jones’s scheme.

Quinten Dormady is getting a lot of blame right now for the problems at quarterback. But so did Nathan Peterman when he played two games in 2013 and 2014.

Then Peterman transferred to Pittsburgh and looked like and NFL-caliber quarterback. The difference?

Jones doesn’t employ a system friendly to developing players, so pocket-passers never thrive in it. Dual-threat quarterbacks do simply because of their raw talents.

Taking all of this into account, there’s no way you can keep Jones at this point. I defended him for a long time, telling everybody to give him this year. But the Florida game and this game are inexcusable. Jones has been at his school longer than Jim McElwain or Smart have been at theirs. But he looks worse than both of them.

Jones again deserves credit for restoring Tennessee football to a certain level of prominence. And he has cleaned up a lot of things. But he’s never going to take the Vols to that next level. That was clear with his coaching Saturday.