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

4. John Currie; 2017

Where to start with the failures of John Currie? He was a secret hire from the start, orchestrated by Jimmy Haslam. We wrote at the time that he was an awful hire for the Tennessee Vols, but even we didn’t know how quickly we would be proven right on that take. That only needed nine months, and the year didn’t even have to end.

Currie’s entire legacy with UT is mishandling the Tennessee football coaching search in 2017. He tried to sneak through Greg Schiano, who nobody wanted. Then he was rejected by Mike Gundy and missed out on Jeff Brohm because he didn’t go through the proper channels.

The search ended with him getting rejected by Dave Doeren before trying to make a home run hire with Mike Leach, which didn’t go through because he was let go before he could secure the deal. It was like he had his ranking of his top coaches each named on a set of notecards, and a hurricane blew them completely out of order. Who goes for Doeren and Schiano before Leach?

But this all started beforehand. It all started because Currie took too long to fire Butch Jones, so he missed out on Dan Mullen and potentially some other big names. That level of incompetence resulted in his failure in the coaching search.

He does get some credit, though. We have to point out that Currie brought back the Lady Vols name, he hired Tony Vitello to coach the baseball program, and he hired Chris Woodruff to lead the men’s tennis program. All three decisions were major successes.