Tennessee football: Vols missed early warning signs with Butch Jones

Tennessee football head coach Butch Jones is on a major hot seat. But the Volunteers missed warning signs with him his first two years on Rocky Top.

When Tennessee football athletic director Dave Hart hired Butch Jones to replace Derek Dooley in December of 2012, everybody knew Jones wasn’t Rocky Top’s first choice. The concerns were clear at that point.

He was successful at both places following Brian Kelly’s success that year. He had only had one season with 10 or more wins. And he had never beaten a ranked team.

However, it was easy for Vols fans to explain all that away, and none of those were very fair criticisms when you looked deeper into the circumstances. So Vols fans gave him a pass that he honestly deserved.

Immediately, he won over the fan base by securing legacy players and elite in-state recruits.

Looking forward, fans had reason to be excited. But the warning signs should have revealed themselves the first season.

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Jones made the reactionary decision to bench Justin Worley and start Nathan Peterman in just the fourth game of his first season, attempting to blame Worley for their blowout loss to the Oregon Ducks the week before. That was already a mistake.

Peterman’s first game would come in The Swamp against the Florida Gators and Will Muschamp’s defense. Looking back, that was a terrible decision. The 2013 Gators were a bad team.

But Jones set Peterman up to fail, and that’s just what he did. He looked awful, and the Vols eventually had to go back to Worley, who did his best to clean up the mess. But thanks to Peterman spotting Florida, the Vols lost a game they should have won 31-17.

That was just the first warning sign, that Jones would make such a reactionary decision so early. It would later cost this Tennessee football team a chance at a bowl game, as they lost four straight after Worley got hurt against the Alabama Crimson Tide.

The fourth game was against the Vanderbilt Commodores at home. Finishing 5-7 should have been the second warning sign.

Remember, Jones did not inherit as big of a mess as Derek Dooley. When he took over in Knoxville, the talent was more full than it was when even Nick Saban took over at Alabama. He should have been good enough to get eight wins.

But falling to 5-7 was really suspicious.

Still, fans ignored everything with his first full recruiting class. And then they expected a turnaround in 2014. It didn’t happen.

Jones coached away another close game to Florida. Tennessee football stumbled to a 7-6 season that year, but they celebrated a return to a bowl game for the first time since 2010, their first winning season since 2009 and their first bowl win since 2007.

What they ignored, though, was the key fact that all great coaches usually have their programs rolling by their second year. Jones just had Tennessee football at 7-6.

But again, he didn’t walk into Dooley’s situation at Tennessee or even Saban’s situation at Michigan State. Those are times when you give the coach more than two years to turn things around.

Jones did not need that. Tennessee should have been rolling by his second year.

His third season, he began to feel the hot seat after coaching away the games to Florida and the Oklahoma Sooners. So by that point, the warning signs were starting to show despite him rebounding his team to finish 9-4.

And we know how they under-achieved his fourth season and how he’s coached this year. But that should have been predictable.

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The problem, though, is the issues Vol Nation saw between the time he was hired and what he did his third year were not addressed. And they should have been. Those warning signs have all come to full fruition, and Jones is now coaching for his life. Had Tennessee football paid attention to the struggles his first two years, they could possibly have been in a better situation now.

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