Tennessee football: Vols couldn’t exploit weak SEC East under Butch Jones

By Caleb Calhoun | Oct 3, 2017

KNOXVILLE, TN - SEPTEMBER 30: General view as fans tailgate prior to the game between the Georgia Bulldogs and Tennessee Volunteers at Neyland Stadium on September 30, 2017 in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo by Joe Robbins/Getty Images) /

Midway through his fifth year as Tennessee football head coach, Butch Jones and the Volunteers let the opportunity to exploit a weak SEC East pass them by.

When Butch Jones’s first season as Tennessee football’s head coach began in 2013, he was walking into a decent situation. The state of Tennessee was beginning to boom with high school talent, helping his recruiting. His predecessor, Derek Dooley, hadn’t won on the field and wasn’t great in recruiting, but he left the program in better shape than where he inherited it. The biggest advantage, though, was what was about to happen to the SEC East.

Nobody saw it at the time, but Tennessee’s two biggest rivals in the division were about to fall off. The negative effects of Florida’s Will Muschamp hire and the departure of Aaron Murray at Georgia left a door wide open for Tennessee to burst through.

With them still rebuilding, though, it allowed the Missouri Tigers and South Carolina Gamecocks to compete for the title Jones’s first year.

The next year, with everybody in the East down, Missouri won it a second straight year.

But then came 2015.

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Florida hired another bad coach in Jim McElwain, which we’re finding out now. South Carolina fell off to a degree that Steve Spurrier resigned later that year. Mizzou fell off completely, and Gary Pinkel resigned.

Meanwhile, Tennessee football had a stable of two Top 5 recruiting classes and a ton of returning talent. The East should have been there’s to dominate for at least two years.

It wasn’t.

The Vols managed to blow a game to Florida in 2015 that cost them the division. That was a significantly worse Florida team than them.

Then came 2016, and with Georgia, South Carolina and Missouri all undergoing coaching changes, the East should have been there’s again. But after beating the Gators and Bulldogs, they could beat the Gamecocks or the Vanderbilt Commodores.

And it cost them again.

Now, as Tennessee football rebuilds again with the loss of Joshua Dobbs, the East rebounds. Georgia has proven already that it’s back on the rise in Kirby Smart’s second year.

Kentucky and Vanderbilt are dangerous teams with Mark Stoops and Derek Mason leading those programs. And Muschamp still owns Tennessee, even as South Carolina’s coach.

Sure, Missouri is still terrible, and Florida is under-achieving. But the division is still significantly better than it was the last two years.

As a result, the Vols missed their golden opportunity. They should have won three straight division titles from 2014 to 2016.

The last time a team from the SEC East won the SEC Championship was 2008, when Urban Meyer’s Florida Gators won the national title with Tim Tebow at quarterback. Since then, the West has dominated.

However, from 2009 to 2012, the East was competitive. That Butch Jones overtook the Vols with the East falling apart and, in his fifth year, is still looking for his first division title, could be his biggest indictment.

When Tennessee football had its glory days during the 1990s, part of their advantage was how much weaker the SEC was at the time. The Florida Gators were their only real competition, and every other program was going through down times.

Phillip Fulmer took advantage, dominating other teams and scoring amazing recruiting classes in the process as a result.

Then, the 2000s came. Other schools caught up with great coaching hires. The Vols fell to the middle of a pack of elite programs in the conference. And the failure to recreate the magic during the 1990s cost Phillip Fulmer his job.

After the Lane Kiffin disaster, Derek Dooley came in to clean up the mess. But he came at the worst time.

Years of trying to make the right hires paid off for the different schools, and Dooley arrived at Tennessee when the program was at its lowest point ever…and the SEC was at its best ever. Although he didn’t do enough on the field, he righted the ship to a certain degree and cleaned up a lot of things.

But in 2011, he still had a depleted roster, he lost his starting quarterback, and Tennessee played arguably the toughest schedule in history, drawing the top three teams from the West, who all finished No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3 nationally. There was no way to recover from that.

Two years later, Jones walked into a much easier situation. The SEC was becoming a dumpster fire outside of the Alabama Crimson Tide. It was worse in the East. And despite all of that, Jones could not take advantage when every other program was going through a rough patch. The Vols may never get a break like that again. And history will see this as a missed opportunity.

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