Tennessee football: Vols vs. Gators won’t have Butch Jones, Jim McElwain blunders

When Tennessee football faces Florida Saturday, Volunteers and Gators fans won’t get to see a match of incompetence between Butch Jones and Jim McElwain.

Tennessee football will take on the Florida Gators once again Saturday, but this time both teams will have new first-year head coaches. It’s a new chapter in the rivalry, and it closes a previous chapter filled with incompetence, inexplicable coaching blunders, and attempts to lose the game.

Yes, we’re talking about the last three Vols match-ups against the Gators. It was Butch Jones vs. Jim McElwain. This will go down as a chapter in the rivalry marked by excessive incompetence on both teams and a fight to lose the game.

Jones had already made a series of ridiculous mistakes in 2013 and 2014 to lose to the Gators. But when 2015 came, McElwain was able to match him in inexplicable decisions. Remember, that year, McElwain called a hideous game offensively.

There was a period, early in the first half, with the Gators leading 7-0 and running it down the Vols’ throats. But after bringing up a 2nd and 3, McElwain’s staff called two pass plays, both of which were incomplete. The Vols tied it up on the next drive.

Then he decided to punt on 4th and less than a yard later in the half near midfield, always a ridiculous decision. McElwain’s horrendous coaching manifested itself in the second half. On a fourth down play, down by 13, he opted for a field goal, inexplicably. Fortunately for him, Jones was not prepared there, so he burned a timeout, allowing McElwain to think about it.

Jones’s incompetence outmatched McElwain’s incompetence, and McElwain changed his mind and went for it. UF converted, scored a touchdown on that drive, and got Tennessee football to waste a timeout. All of a sudden, all of the terrible coaching by McElwain in the first half flipped over to Jones.

We know what happened then. After burning that timeout, Jones decided against going for two when his team scored a late touchdown to go up 26-14. He then took the game out of his offense’s hands with a chance to win it up 27-21. Then his staff made the worst defensive call all game that allowed Will Grier to convert a 4th and long for a touchdown to put the Gators ahead 28-27.

Finally, an offense based on tempo could only get off four plays on a final, potential game-winning drive. This was partially because Jones himself wasn’t aware of a ruling that the clock keeps running if a player fumbles the ball out of bounds.

Anyway, Jones beat McElwain in the incompetence game that day. The next year, it was Jones’s turn to benefit from McElwain’s incompetence. Don’t get me wrong, Jones had his own fair share. He couldn’t manage another 1st and goal situation from the one, as his staff inexplicably pulled the keep the offense in shotgun strategy the whole, time, and the Vols couldn’t convert.

Such mistakes built Florida a 21-0 lead. Then, however, came the second half. Tennessee football fans remember the offensive onslaught that came about, and with good reason. But don’t forget about the horrendous coaching of McElwain that helped them out.

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After Austin Appleby torched a dinged up Vols secondary in the first half, McElwain turned to the ground game in the second half and then just called zone reads the whole time except for obvious passing downs. That made it easy for Bob Shoop to shut things down, and the defense didn’t allow a first down the entire half except for one late touchdown drive by Florida in which the Vols were trying to burn clock. So that year, Vols fans could thank McElwain for the win.

But if you thought those two games were bad, what the two did in The Swamp last year was the stuff of legendary incompetence. We’ve already discussed in detail Jones’s epic failures in that game: seven passes on two drives inside the 10-yard line when John Kelly was running it down their throats, another play-action on 3rd and 1 that resulted in a sack and knocked his team out of field goal range, and not having a dime package to cover that last Hail Mary.

But what Jones really did was shield McElwain from some of the worst mistakes ever as well. With an offense that had no passing game last year and that was running the ball down Tennessee football’s throat, McElwain went for balance in the game. The result was, after going up 13-3, the Gators blowing it and allowing UT to come back and tie it thanks to a late interception.

Then, on the final drive before the memorable Florida Hail Mary, McElwain was bailed out of the worst clock management ever. With time running out, he ran it at one point for a first down, then let the clock run down before calling a timeout. There was a series of boos, and rightfully so, at his handling of that. He followed it up by calling the Hail Mary, even though they could’ve had a shot to get closer into field goal range.

McElwain’s saving grace? Jones apparently never knew how to defend a Hail Mary. So Florida converted it for a 26-20 win, and in the final battle between the two, Jones’s incompetence won out, giving McElwain the win.

When Jeremy Pruitt and Dan Mullen take the field Saturday, we’re not likely to witness a comedy show the way we have the last three years. Tennessee football will have to prepare for a much more competent coach at home. But maybe they’ll be lucky and have some competence on their own side now. The three-part series of The Two Stooges, though, will not return for a fourth season. So the jokes likely won’t be as good.