Tennessee football players in the NFL is always a way to measure Volunteers coaches. Derek Dooley may have been misjudged.
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When Butch Jones took the head coaching job after the 2012 season, Tennessee football was coming off three straight losing years and hadn’t had a Top 10 recruiting class since 2010. The mood at the time was the exact opposite of what it is now.
Immediately, Jones began securing a Top 5 class for 2014, and he won over the fan base with his locking in of in-state talent. Many of these guys weren’t even being targeted by Dooley, and fans blamed him more than ever for his lackluster recruiting. What a difference time makes!
Five years later, with another NFL Draft set to take shape, it’s time to revisit exactly what everybody thought of Dooley’s recruiting at the time. Yes, he failed to secure Top 10 classes. But looking back, he got way more productive players than Jones did.
Dooley arrived at Tennessee in 2010. By 2012, the first year he was able to have one of his guys in the draft, Tennessee football produced one player. That player was Malik Jackson, a transfer that Dooley went after and got. Jackson has become an elite pro player that nobody can take anything away from.
Meanwhile, the 2009 class that Lane Kiffin left Dooley had nobody in that class. Fast-forward to a year later, 2013. The Vols produced Cordarrelle Patterson, Dallas Thomas, Mychal Rivera and Justin Hunter. Of all four of those guys, Thomas is the only one that Dooley didn’t recruit and secure a commitment from. He’s also been the least productive of the four in the league.
Patterson, meanwhile, is a Pro Bowl player, and Rivera and Hunter have been reliable producers for teams in the passing game. So Dooley deserves credit for both of those guys.
Let’s move onto 2014. These were players who spent a year playing for Butch Jones, but they were all recruited by Dooley. And as Jones was making a splash with high star-ratings with his recruiting class, Dooley’s players were quietly filling NFL rosters.
To be fair, three guys were taken in that draft, Ja’Wuan James, Zach Fulton and Daniel McCullers, and two of them, James and Fulton, actually committed to Kiffin. But Dooley had to keep them, and he did get McCullers. So he deserves credit for that.
Dooley’s fingerprints on Tennessee football players in the pros goes beyond the NFL Draft, however. Because of the lack of success on the field, many players did not get drafted.
Of the 29 Tennessee football players listed by ESPN on NFL rosters, 13 were either commitments or walk-ons for Dooley. Now, as we said, some of those guys, like James and Fulton, were commitments to Kiffin.
So let’s be fair. Add in Tyler Bray, and three guys fit that mold. That makes 10 of the 29 from Dooley. However, of the six guys who went in last year’s NFL Draft, Dooley actually secured the commitments of two of them: Cameron Sutton and Jalen Reeves-Maybin. And he probably would have gotten Derek Barnett. So things even out.
We say all this to note that Butch Jones, while putting out top recruiting classes, was getting hollow results. This year’s NFL Draft should feature a number of graduates from that Top 5 Tennessee football recruiting class in 2014. However, there are no projections from Rocky Top in the first three rounds.
Meanwhile, top-notch guys from that team like Jalen Hurd are no longer with the program. We’ll have another year next year to measure Jones recruits. Perhaps he’ll surpass Dooley. What’s clear, though, is that despite the recruiting rankings, Dooley had a better picture when it came to evaluating talent.
Remember, Dooley had a way bigger mess to deal with than Jones. He inherited a roster depleted due to the attrition of three head coaches in three years. That made the 6-6 2010 season understandable. Then he had to deal with the NCAA investigations. So recruiting at that time was almost impossible.
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Yet he still managed to put out some quality NFL talent. Jones, meanwhile, had five years with the program. And when it’s all said and done, NFL players he recruited and signed may only match what Dooley got in three years with a program in much worse shape. Tennessee football fans would never admit these things in 2013 or 2014. But now, they just might.