Tennessee football’s 10 coaches who inherited biggest mess
player. 839. Pick Analysis. First year: 1977. Last winning season: 1976. Scouting Report. Johnny Majors. 2
No hire on paper was a greater home run hire than Johnny Majors in 1976. Not even Nick Saban to the Alabama Crimson Tide could compete at the time. Majors was a Tennessee football legend, finishing second in the Heisman race in 1956 while leading the Vols to a 10-0 regular season record and SEC Championship.
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At the time of his hire, Majors had just won a national championship with the Pittsburgh Panthers, a program he built up from scratch four years earlier. So he’s a UT legend who had instant credibility. When he took over the Vols, the idea was that the rebuilding process would be quick and easy. After all, they hadn’t had a losing seasons since 1964.
However, the program was in disarray in ways that Bill Battle couldn’t even fix. Massively outdated facilities and a lack of focus on national recruiting when high school football was much better in rival SEC states had put the program far behind everybody else. As a result, UT’s slide could not stop with the hire of Majors, and they only had one winning season his first four years.
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Majors eventually got the program to where he wanted it, winning the SEC Championship in 1985, 1989 and 1990, but it was a long, tedious process. It was under his leadership that the Vols began reaching a national level of interest. But the fact that it hadn’t done that already when he took over showed how far behind it was.