Tennessee football: Losses to Florida derailed final season of last two Vols coaches

Tennessee football will face Florida Saturday with a new head coach. The previous two had their final seasons derailed by Volunteers losses to the Gators.

Jeremy Pruitt is lucky this is just his first year with Tennessee football and he’s not on any hot seat yet. But whenever he is on one as UT’s head coach, a loss to the Florida Gators may be the thing to send him in a tailspin.

Heck, that’s the reason he’s on Rocky Top to begin with. The previous two Vols head coaches, Butch Jones and Derek Dooley, could never really recover from that first loss of the season in 2012 and 2017 respectively.

Looking back on last year’s loss to the Gators, Jones could never recover because it was a loss that solidified him belonging on the hot seat. Up to that point, the first signs of hot seat talk were an underachieving 2016 season. However, he had still had a Top 25 finish that year for a second straight season, which the Vols hadn’t done in a decade. And before that year, everything UT-related was trending upward in the program.

So Jones deserved the chance to lead the Vols for a fifth year. And even after a 2-0 start that included an incredibly lucky win over the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, cautious optimism existed around that team. Then came that Florida game.

We’ve discussed at length the number of dumb coaching decisions Jones made in that game. It was one of the worst-coached games in college football history. Combine that with the fact that he lost to a Florida team that was one of the worst in school history AND was missing nine players due to suspension, and fans had every reason to be frustrated with him.

The anger at how badly Jones botched that game immediately put him on the hot seat, and many fans were rooting for him to fail at that point just so they could fire him. Even I did a 180 after defending Jones up to that point. Still, the pressure mounted and oozed through the team, and after barely beating the UMASS Minutemen, the Vols lost four straight and five of six to see Jones get fired.

Dooley’s situation, five years before, was a different story. After the toughest rebuilding job in the nation at the time, 2012 was supposed to be his breakout year. He had finally restocked the roster after attrition depleted it, and Tennessee football could return to prominence.

Just like Jones in 2017, Dooley started the season off with a win in the Chick-Fil-A Kickoff Classic in Atlanta, as he beat the N.C. State Wolfpack. And the Vols were 2-0 and in the Top 25 when the Florida Gators came to town. Florida, meanwhile, in their second year under Will Muschamp, was also 2-0.

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College Gameday was in Knoxville for the showdown, and this would be the match-up to catapult the Vols back into the national picture. And through three quarters, it looked like that was happening. Tennessee football had built a 20-13 lead and then stopped Florida on a fake punt. They had a chance at a kill shot, but they couldn’t capitalize.

The Gators then reeled off three straight touchdowns, aided by a Tyler Bray interception, and the Vols could never recover. Unlike Jones in 2017, Dooley didn’t cost the Vols with dumb coaching. Also, he actually lost to a good Florida team, one that would finish the year 11-2 and go to the Sugar Bowl.

But that loss signaled a rough road ahead with Sal Sunseri running the defense in 2012. What it really did was wreck the Vols’ confidence. Over the course of the rest of the SEC season, the Vols would struggle on defense but have multiple chances to win the game late, only to watch their high-powered offense panic due to lack of confidence.

This happened against the Georgia Bulldogs, Mississippi State Bulldogs, South Carolina Gamecocks and even Missouri Tigers. If the Vols beat Florida, confidence probably carries them to wins in all of those games. And they’d be sitting at 9-1 then with the Vanderbilt Commodores and Kentucky Wildcats to close out the season.

Instead, they were 4-6 going into that Vandy game, and Dooley being all but fired made that an impossible night for the Vols. It all came back to the Florida game and the team never finding the right mentality.

This year, with Pruitt and Dan Mullen facing each other, nobody’s going to get fired from Saturday’s game. But Tennessee football coaches can have their careers ruined by losing to the Gators. Even Phillip Fulmer, who lost a lot of bad games in 2008, could point to the Florida blowout loss that year as the game that really turned all the fans against him.