Tennessee football: 4 OC changes that didn’t work out for Vols

Tennessee football offensive coordinator Jim Chaney is a question mark under Jeremy Pruitt. Here are four times such changes failed the Volunteers.

Assistant coach hires have been responsible for very successful tenures of Tennessee football head coaches, and they have also been the downfall of many. With Jim Chaney as the Vols’ new offensive coordinator, Jeremy Pruitt is in the same situation.

The last three fires the Vols made can largely be traced directly to staff decisions they made. Pruitt won’t get fired in 2019 because of Chaney unless it gets historically disastrous, but it could cost him in the near future.

Or it could work out. But Tennessee football hasn’t had the best luck with coordinator changes in recent years. In fact, the Vols have a history of bad coordinator hires surprisingly costing them when nobody expected it to.

In this post, we’re going to look at the four times the Vols changed offensive coordinators and it did not work out for them. Not all of these offensive coordinators were failures. But they all struggled relative to what their predecessor did.

They also have to be coordinator changes under the same head coach. For instance, Mike Bajakian under Butch Jones doesn’t count. The same is true with Tyson Helton this past year. But even without him, there is extensive history of bad coordinator hires on both sides of the ball on Rocky Top.

Sometimes, they can be so bad that the focus on the next head coach will be all about the best offensive mind. Yes, we have an example of that here, which we’re going to get to as we delve into this list.

So which offensive coordinators were problematic on Rocky Top? Who were fans glad to see gone? Let’s break it down here. We’ll go in reverse order of when they happened, not necessarily rank them. These are four offensive coordinator hires that didn’t work out for Tennessee football.