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Tennessee football: Butch Jones is wrong about Vols past two seasons

By Caleb Calhoun

KNOXVILLE, TN - SEPTEMBER 15: A view of the outside of Neyland Stadium before a game between the Florida Gators and Tennessee Volunteers on September 15, 2012 in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo by John Sommers II/Getty Images)
KNOXVILLE, TN - SEPTEMBER 15: A view of the outside of Neyland Stadium before a game between the Florida Gators and Tennessee Volunteers on September 15, 2012 in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo by John Sommers II/Getty Images) /
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Tennessee football head coach Butch Jones said the past two years have been two of the best in the Volunteers’ last 20 years. Here’s why he’s wrong.

Let’s first be fair to Butch Jones. Despite the hot seat that he deserves to be on, the past two years have been the best for Tennessee football ever since the retirement of Phillip Fulmer. And he deserves a ton of credit for getting the program back to that level.

However, he went overboard trying to sell the program this week. Jones said that these past two seasons have been two of the best in the last 20 years.

Depending on what qualifies as the best, he’s dead wrong.

Jones is forgetting that the past 20 seasons before this year include some of the best in Tennessee football history. There’s obviously the national championship. And nobody could think that either year comes close to that year.

But even before then, you have Peyton Manning’s SEC Championship season in 1997. That was a better year than either of the past two as well.

In fact, the first three years of the past 20 years are better than either of the past two years Jones referenced. The 1999 season was also better. Sure, Tennessee was just 9-3. But it was a much more impressive 9-3 record than either of the 9-4 records the past two years.

Then there’s the 2001 season. Tennessee football won the East, finished No. 4 in the country, and beat Florida in The Swamp.

They also won the East in 2004 and 2007.

And in 2003, the Vols won a share of the East and finished 10-3. That’s six seasons we have named that are better than either of the previous two years under Jones.

The previous two years are comparable to what the Vols did in 2000 and 2006. So their fighting for the seventh best season of the past 20 years. That hardly clarifies as among the best.

It’s among the better ones. And that deserves mention. As we said, Jones has restored the program in impressive fashion. But it’s not among the best seasons in the past 20 years for Tennessee football. So it was important to call him out for being wrong here.

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