Tennessee football head coach Jeremy Pruitt went 5-7 in 2018. Here’s how his year compares to other Volunteers’ coaching candidates in 2017.
It has now been over a year since the disastrous 4-8 season and tumultuous coaching search that followed for the Tennessee football program. We all know that Phillip Fulmer took over the first weekend in December and found Jeremy Pruitt a few days later.
When you combine interviews and outreach conducted by Fulmer and John Currie, fan support for candidates, and candidates interested in the job, it’s safe to say the Vols had well over 20 names pop up at some point or another. After a 5-7 season in 2018, though, it’s hard to know if Pruitt was the right choice compared to those guys.
Could Tennessee football have done better? We know that they certainly could have done worse. And it’ll take more than one year to know if the coaching search and all the drama behind it resulted in the right guy taking the job.
But for fun, let’s compare Pruitt to other coaches who were candidates for the job. In this post, we’re only going to focus on candidates whose names repetitively popped up. We will also look at people the Vols seriously considered, and they have to have reached out to all these candidates.
A quick call and a rejection doesn’t count, and no proof of an interview eliminates people too. This includes Brent Venables, Chip Kelly, Lane Kiffin, Mike Norvell, Kevin Sumlin, Gary Patterson, and Justin Fuente. We’re also only including people who coached in 2018, which eliminates Les Miles.
There are also people the Vols spoke with whom we still eliminated. That includes Tee Martin since his interview with Fulmer never appeared to be about serious consideration for the head coaching vacancy. Nothing happened beyond one interview with Chris Petersen and Chad Morris, so they’re both left off as well.
But amidst all of that, we still know of 10 candidates that were clear contenders. So let’s go ahead and rank their 2018 performances here here. And yes, we’re going to include Pruitt’s season on Rocky Top. So this is our ranking of the 10 Tennessee football coaching candidates who had the best seasons in 2018.