The Tennessee Vols hired numerous head coaches recently, from Rick Barnes to Jeremy Pruitt. Here are the 10 notable ones for the Volunteers this decade.
After decades of stability for the Tennessee Vols athletic program, everything began to collapse in the late 2000s. It took another toll this decade, and it began to mark a period of instability for Rocky Top.
To give you an idea of this instability, UT had a grand total of nine head coaches in football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball from 1978 through 2007, a 30-year period, and six of those were in men’s basketball alone. Just this decade, they have had 10 full-time coaches in those sports, 12 if you count Jim Chaney and Brady Hoke serving as interim football coaches.
But it gets worse. If you add softball and baseball, that period from 1978 to 2007 saw a grand total of 16 head coaches. This decade alone, they have seen 14 coaches in those sports. If you add the interim coaches like we did, then it’s 16 coaches for this decade alone and 16 over a 30-year period from 1978 to 2007. That doesn’t even count the extra football coach in 2009, Lane Kiffin.
Simply put, this has been a decade of turmoil for the Tennessee Vols. Some of it was due to tragic circumstances that were nobody’s fault, referring to the most legendary coach suffering an illness. Other cases involved coaches lying and getting into trouble in ways that wrecked their respective programs. A few just didn’t work out. But some were just bad hires from the start.
So how did everything work out? Well, in this post, we’re going to look at the 10 hires made for the Tennessee Vols this decade across those notable sports. Of course, softball has been the only consistent one with Ralph and Karen Weekly. But baseball, women’s basketball, men’s basketball and football have all had 13 different head coaches and 10 different hires this decade.
This is a ranking of those hires. However, we’re going to do a departure from how we do our rankings. We won’t base these rankings on how the hires work out. After all, the jury is out on at least two of them. What we’ll do is rank the hires on how good they were on their faces at the time.
Anybody can criticize or praise a hire with the benefit of hindsight. The question, though, is if the hire made sense at the time. If it was a bad hire on the surface that didn’t work out, it’s doubly bad. But this is not a ranking specifically on how each hire worked out. This is just a ranking of how good the 10 most notable Tennessee Vols athletic hires were this decade. So let’s get started.