Tennessee Vols cowardly dropping Big Orange Caravan is absurdly transparent

Tennessee Vols figures Phillip Fulmer, Jeremy Pruitt, Rick Barnes and Kellie Harper all look bad with the Volunteers dropping the Big Orange Caravan.

Tennessee basketball head coach Rick Barnes continues to fight off rumors about his handling of the UCLA Bruins. Jeremy Pruitt is entering his second year with Tennessee football after a staff overhaul, a 5-7 season and news of raised ticket prices. The Tennessee Vols just fired a legend, albeit justifiably, in women’s basketball as head coach and replaced her with a former pupil.

Simply put, it’s been a crazy offseason for UT athletics. And it’s certainly one that would draw out questions from fans across the state and the region. And all of a sudden, the athletic department cowardly decides there’s no need for the traditional Big Orange Caravan, which has the major coaches and A.D. do just that.

Marky Billson of Tri-Cities Sports NOW has a post up right now accurately describing the caravan for what it is: a way for officials to dodge questions. Anybody interested should go check it out now, but one of the points he makes is that UT media members should call it out.

Count me in as a media member willing to call it out. For full disclosure, I go on Marky’s radio show usually every Tuesday at 12:30 p.m. to discuss the state of the Tennessee Vols. But that does not mean we agree on everything. This just happens to be one of those times we are 100 percent in agreement.

There is no way to ignore how bad this looks. It wreaks of entitlement and being above the public, the people who patronize the product and the media who promote it. As you can see from our first paragraph, Vols fans have a lot of questions to ask.

Why did you raise ticket prices?

Just how close really was Rick Barnes to leaving for UCLA?

How committed is the administration to women’s basketball?

As an athletic director still in the process of completing his first full season on Rocky Top, these are things Fulmer should have to answer. And yes, Pruitt, Harper and Barnes should address tough questions as well.

Now, I’m not naive. Most fans aren’t going to spend their time trying to nail coaches or administrators to the wall with tough questions. But because of that, it makes even less sense to avoid a trip across the state. UT is clearly doing this to avoid any chance whatsoever of a tough question, and it’s laughably transparent.

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The most transparent part about this is what they replaced it with. Smokey and the spirit squad will be going on a trip across the state. Blake Toppmeyer says that Fulmer is apparently “excited” about the new concept.

Who in the administration honestly believes that? Nobody in the world could honestly think that fans would rather meet a mascot and a group of cheerleaders instead of the coaches and administrators those people are cheering on. What is so exciting about this for Fulmer and co.? Why is he excited about keeping the public out of the loop?

This lie is so pathetic it hurts. They would have been better off just saying they’re canceling the caravan instead of having this spirit squad to claim as a replacement. It wreaks of something that a leader stuck in the 1980s would do without any realization of how the Internet works in general, much less social media. And there were already some media members, to Marky’s post, who did not take kindly to this on Twitter.

Will the coaches and administrators think they pulled one over on fans? Well, Barnes and Fulmer have been around just long enough to think that. Pruitt is used to creating an impenetrable bubble having spent so many years with Saban. But if any of them are naive as to think they fooled people with this move, then you really have to question their judgment.

Nobody who understands the scope of college athletics that they could truly fool fans like that. John Currie lost his job trying to sneak in the Greg Schiano hire and not taking Twitter into account. It seems even after him, Tennessee Vols leaders are still not aware of how things travel on the web. And a scarier thought than all this is the school being in the hands of such people.