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 Massively outdated facilities and a lack of focus on national recruiting when high school football was much better in rival SEC states had put the program far behind everybody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.
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.