Tennessee football: Ranking all 10 assistant coaches on Vols 2019 staff

David Johnson is a very good coach and has a track record of success coaching wide receivers. He also has a wide range of experience coaching all positions on the offensive side of the ball, so Tennessee football should be fine with him leading the running backs.

However, to this point, his track record coaching running backs has not been that good. The last time Johnson coached running backs was from 2012 to 2015 while with the Tulane Green Wave, and, well, he never had a rushing attack average over five yards a carry. Three of those years, he failed to average over four yards a carry.

With two of those years in Conference USA play and two in American Athletic Conference play, those are bad numbers. But to be fair, this was during the disastrous Curtis Johnson period, which was met with records of 2-10, 7-6, 3-9 and 3-9. So maybe it wasn’t all about Johnson.

Either way, he’s got a ton of work to do to prove he can coach running backs. He didn’t do too bad a job with what he had at receiver last year, and you saw Josh Palmer develop. So he knows how to work with players. But now it’s time for him to prove it while coaching running backs. And he has the most dynamic player of anybody now to work with in Ty Chandler.