Ranking Tennessee football coaches who played for rival schools

Jeremy Pruitt is the fourth Tennessee football Volunteers head coach who played for a rival.

History shows Tennessee football can have success with great coaches who came from anywhere. That is one area that doesn’t have a common denominator when it comes to alma maters, and they truly do look in all places for greatness.

The Vols’ greatest head coach ever, Robert Neyland, played at Army and eventually became a Brigadier General. Other elite coaches played for UT, including Phillip Fulmer, Johnny Majors, Bowden Wyatt and John Barnhill. Then there are coaches who played for other major programs, including Zora G. Clevenger, John Bender and M.B. Banks.

However, some of the best Tennessee football coaches came directly from rival schools. These are coaches who likely hated the Vols when they played college ball but then went on to become leaders of the program.

UT is currently under the leadership of one such head coach in Jeremy Pruitt. But what does the program’s success look like under other head coaches with similar backgrounds? And where does Pruitt rank among them?

In this post, we’re going to rank the UT coaches who played for rival schools, including Pruitt. To qualify for this list, a coach only has to have played for a school that ever could have been considered a rival of the Vols in any way.

Being a rival could mean being a yearly conference opponent, a yearly in-state rival or a rival who simply generates longstanding hatred. And they didn’t have to be rivals at the time the coach played for them. They only have to have been a rival of the program at some point.

So how deep does such a list go? Which coaches the history of Rocky Top made their way onto it? Let’s break all of that down here. This is our ranking of Tennessee football’s four head coaches who ever played for rival schools.