Ranking all five Tennessee Vols athletic directors by performance in 2010s decade

Lots of attrition has meant four Tennessee Vols athletic directors from 2010 through 2019. Here is how they rank by their performance with the Volunteers.

It’s no secret that administrative issues plagued the Tennessee Vols this decade. Massive disagreements among boosters, including some who were genuinely incompetent, did a lot to set back Rocky Top over this period of time.

However, all of them did some positive things, and most of them have done some grossly negative things. In this post, we’re going to take all of their actions into account to rank their tenures with UT by performance throughout this decade.

When you look at how we analyze each of them, you’ll see why the Tennessee Vols struggled so much on the football front. Mistake after mistake cost them, and each athletic director, except for one to this point, shoulders some blame for what happened.

These rankings are mostly by default. There’s no way to ignore the fact that nobody deserves to be at the top of this list right now. All we can do is rank them by who messed up the least to this point, and that’s an embarrassment.

Dating back to 1992, when Johnny Majors was fired, it’s easy to see why he hated the administrators so much. There have been numerous infrastructural issues that oozed into the athletic department and incompetence all over, starting with Haslam himself.

Anyway, some of them had high moments despite their failures, and we’ll point those out as well. But the negatives largely outweighed the positives with these guys, so it will be hard to give anybody credit for being higher on this list than other people.

Still, we have to do this ranking. And we need to look back on what they all did to and for UT this decade. So let’s break it all down here. This is our ranking of all five Tennessee Vols athletic directors based on their performances from 2010 through 2019.