Tennessee Vols 13 most unlucky breaks between firing, bringing back Phillip Fulmer

1. Tennessee football is humiliated nationally with the 2017 coaching search.

This is bad luck due to incompetence, but it’s bad luck nonetheless. And, ironically, it was the final bit of bad luck that led to the Tennessee Vols finally bringing Phillip Fulmer back into the program. So this list started with the actions of the guy who replaced Fulmer, and it ends with the incident that brought Fulmer back. Can you say poetic justice?

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John Currie, who came from the Kansas State Wildcats, was always a bad hire. This site documented the fact that he was incompetent with Kansas State and the fact that he was a puppet of Jimmy Haslam, the incompetent failed businessman who has never succeeded at anything in life without Daddy’s help.

Well, it all came to fruition during the coaching search. Currie and Haslam colluded to try to sneak in Greg Schiano after they couldn’t get Dan Mullen. Fortunately for Rocky Top, the fans caught wind of it.

People likely successful in their own lives managed to take control of the university and out of the hands of career failures like Haslam, who was once in billions of dollars of debt while running an oil company (which should be impossible to run into debt), whose company was implicated in a rebate scam, and who has managed to take the Cleveland Browns 1-31 as owner the past two years. Anyway, as he tried to use Currie to project his life’s work of losing at everything onto Rocky Top, it backfired.

I gues you could Jimmy Haslam is so incompetent he doesn’t even know how to lose at what he does. So the fans nixed the Schiano hire, rightfully so, and sent Currie and Haslam on a chase to find a new coach.

Here’s the problem. Incompetence breeds incompetence. So the Tennessee Vols athletic program suffered national humiliation due to bad timing and an incompetent staff. They first got rejected by Mike Gundy.

The incompetence led them to think Dave Doeren was a decent hire. But, as luck would have it, Doeren rejected the offer, saving Currie and Haslam from their own track record of failing at everything they do.

Then there was the bad luck of timing. That’s how Tennessee football missed out on Jeff Brohm and Mike Leach, two proven coaches who would have won big here. Simply put, bad luck and incompetence cost them all the way around. And this was the final act of bad luck before the university did what needs to be done, bringing Fulmer back as A.D. to end the curse. So, you could say, this final act was a blessing in disguise.

Next: Tennessee football 2018 depth chart projection

As you can see with this list, the Tennessee Vols had lots of bad luck during their nine years without Fulmer. But one thing that’s true is that lots of it was due to massive levels of incompetence.Some things were just massively unfortunate, but others could have been avoided. It’s why, on Friday the 13th, we preach that you make your own luck. Fulmer knew that, and it’s why he was a winner. It’s also why he’s back in Knoxville running the show.