Tennessee football: Ranking Vols last 10 seasons with first-year coordinator

Tennessee football has a history with first-year coordinators, and the same is true in 2019. Here is a ranking of the last 10 Volunteers seasons like that.

Entering the 2019 season, one concern surrounding Tennessee football is the fact that Jeremy Pruitt gave up play-calling duties on defense. He has replaced himself with Derrick Ansley, who is the Vols’ new defensive coordinator and secondary coach.

Pruitt changed all three coordinators this year, moving Kevin Sherrer to special teams coordinator and bringing in Jim Chaney as offensive coordinator. Changing coordinators can be a regular thing, though. What’s less common is when the new coordinator has no experience in the role.

Technically, Tennessee football had that last year with Sherrer, but Pruitt was really the defensive coordinator, so we’re not counting that one. Meanwhile, Ansley was a co-defensive coordinator on the 2015 Kentucky Wildcats, but he didn’t hold the actual role.

So this is another year on Rocky Top in which the Vols have an offensive or defensive coordinator with no prior experience in the role. As Pruitt gets set to enter his second season, that could be a big deal for him and the Vols.

What was it like before this year, though? After all, previous UT coaches have a history of promoting staff members and hiring first-year coordinators to turn around their programs or keep things going.

The results, however, have been mixed. In this post, we’re going to look at the last 10 seasons the Vols hired a coordinator who had no experience in that role before taking the job. Again, these aren’t coordinator changes. They are changes that bring in a first-year coordinator.

Obviously, it gets harder the further back you go to officially count somebody as a coordinator because they would be often labeled as just an assistant. But we can trace this back to when Johnny Majors took over with the Vols.

Simply put, there are plenty of notable seasons in school history that we can look back at to try to gauge what will happen this year. So let’s go ahead and break them down. This is our ranking of the previous 10 seasons in which Tennessee football had an offensive or defensive coordinator with no prior experience in the role.