Similar to Johnny Majors, Derek Dooley inherited one of the biggest messes on here despite being one of the few coaches who ironically inherited a program that had a winning season the year before. However, Tennessee football was a disaster when he took over.
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We started this list with Lane Kiffin. Everything about the mess Kiffin inherited continued with Dooley. However, Kiffin also dismissed half the roster to make room for his own recruits, turning the 2007 class into a bust, and his own 2009 class was a complete bust as well, with half the guys gone by Dooley’s second season.
Beyond those issues, Kiffin left so late that when Dooley was hired he didn’t have much time to put together his own class in 2010, and Kiffin took lots of the recruits he had the Vols targeting with him to the USC Trojans, trying to even take his early enrollees. There were still the horrendous classes of 2008 and some of 2006.
So Dooley was left with a roster of two horrible recruiting classes and two classes that had half the guys missing from it by the time he took over. Meanwhile, the SEC remained at its peak, which we discussed with Kiffin. Oh, and Kiffin left the Vols under NCAA investigation. Simply put, Dooley walked into a gigantic mess.
At the time, Tennessee football had gone 12-13 its previous two years. The amount of attrition from Phillip Fulmer to Lane Kiffin meant Dooley would have to be nearly perfect and avoid any bad breaks to have a successful rebuild. Well, a couple of bad breaks and a couple of mistakes by him proved costly, so he didn’t last past three years. But it wasn’t really his fault.