Tennessee football: Ranking every Vols team in 2010s decade
10. 2017
4-8 (0-8)
*No postseason
This was when the bottom fell out of what Butch Jones pretended to build. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. One year before, the Vols were 5-0, in the top 10 and on an 11-game winning streak. The program had been improving every year and reached its peak at that moment. But then they lost three straight, Jalen Hurd transferred, and the team favored to win the East finished 8-4.
After winning the Music City Bowl, they lost six key guys to the NFL. Losing so much talent combined with an underwhelming recruiting class made for concern entering 2017. Then there was a staff overhaul with six new assistants, most notably Larry Scott replacing Mike DeBord as offensive coordinator.
UT was still in the top 25, and named Quinten Dormady starting quarterback. Dormady and Marquez Callaway, with Jennings suffering a season-ending injury, led the Vols to a season-opening double-overtime 42-41 win over the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. After getting to 2-0, though, the game that turned everybody against Jones happened.
Against the Florida Gators, a program collapsing under Jim McElwain with 10 players suspended, the Vols lost 26-20 on a last second Hail Mary because, as Jones put it, they didn’t have a dime package. Before that, though, he didn’t run it on two separate trips inside the 10-yard line resulting in a combined 0 points. We wrote here about all his horrible decisions at the time.
That’s when the criticism reached peak level. A week later, the Vols held on against the horrible UMASS Minutemen, scoring 0 points in the second half to win 17-13. Jones went on his infamous rant against the media, the same Jones who used phrases like “brick by brick,” “champions of life” and “five-star hearts.” Following that was a 41-0 loss to the Georgia Bulldogs at home.
So things looked awful heading into the bye. In desperation, Jones and Scott scapegoated Dormady and turned to Jarrett Guarantano (both quarterbacks reached bowl games this year, by the way). With Guarantano, they failed to score an offensive touchdown in losses to the South Carolina Gamecocks and Alabama Crimson Tide. Then they lost to the Kentucky Wildcats.
After beating the Southern Miss Golden Eagles and then getting blown out by the Missouri Tigers, Jones was finally fired. Brady Hoke finished the year, but there was no improvement, as they got blown out at home by the LSU Tigers and Vanderbilt Commodores. So Tennessee football had its first eight-loss season and winless SEC season in school history.
The disastrous attempted Greg Schiano hire came after all of this, which resulted in a fan revolt against the administration. Taking all this into account, there is no doubt this last-place team in the SEC is the worst of the decade.