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Tennessee football’s 10 coaches who inherited biggest mess

By Caleb Calhoun

KNOXVILLE, TN - SEPTEMBER 18: Tennessee Volunteers head coach Derek Dooley looks on before the game against the Florida Gators at Neyland Stadium on September 18, 2010 in Knoxville, Tennessee. Florida won 31-17. (Photo by Joe Robbins/Getty Images)
KNOXVILLE, TN - SEPTEMBER 18: Tennessee Volunteers head coach Derek Dooley looks on before the game against the Florida Gators at Neyland Stadium on September 18, 2010 in Knoxville, Tennessee. Florida won 31-17. (Photo by Joe Robbins/Getty Images) /
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Many coaches throughout Tennessee football’s history walked into a mess. Here are the 10 who took over the Volunteers in the worst situations.

Plenty of Tennessee football head coaches took over the program when it was in need of a rebuild. Whether it was due to the program losing for years, extenuating circumstances that left it wrecked or just being behind the times, many different things have left the program in a complete mess when a new head coach came in.

Obviously, the greatest coaches on Rocky Top actually walked into good situations. UT was a national power when Phillip Fulmer, and three different coaches had built up the program before Robert Neyland took over. Fulmer and Neyland just took the Vols to the next level.

Other head coaches, however, had to start from scratch. And Tennessee football was in a state that required starting from scratch multiple times. Sometimes, head coaches who started from scratch failed to rebuild it, meaning their successors also had to start from scratch.

But who inherited the biggest mess? In this post, that’s what we’re going to take a look at. We will be analyzing head coaches who walked into the worst situations on Rocky Top and ranking them based on how bad they were.

Our criteria can include a number of things, including how long the program had labored under losing records, how much updating needed to be done when a coach took over and how limited the roster was. All of these things are relevant.

What is not relevant, however, is how good of a job a particular head coach did. We’re not looking at the performance of the coaches in this scenario, as many of the guys were actually pretty big failures on Rocky Top. However, in some cases, the situation they inherited will definitely make it more understandable.

So just how bad were some of these cases? Who was responsible for making them that bad? Let’s break all of that down here. This is our ranking of Tennessee football’s 10 head coaches who walked into the worst situations when they took over the Vols.

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