Tennessee football’s five worst seasons with third-year coach

Jeremy Pruitt will want to avoid these seasons by Tennessee football Volunteers third-year coaches.

Third seasons can make or break a head coach on Rocky Top. Tennessee football has had its fair share of both throughout its history. In recent years, a coach has always been defined by the progress he shows in his third year.

Sometimes, it shows clear improvement to the point that the coach is worth staying around, even if the season itself wasn’t great. In other cases, coaches can fool people with a successful third year only to become disappointments later. Butch Jones was that.

However, there are plenty of times a coach had a disastrous third season, sometimes resulting in his firing. Tennessee football has had a wide range of things happen in a coach’s third season, and this is the first year a coach is often out of excuses for not showing improvement.

In this post, we’re going to rank the Vols’ worst seasons with a third-year head coach. As Jeremy Pruitt enters his third year, conventional wisdom suggest he will improve since he dramatically improved from his first to second year. That’s not always the case, though, as we’ll show with the seasons on this list. There’s not a science to this.

Many of these coaches came from the early years of Rocky Top, before the program reached the level it’s at right now. Only 13 coaches in UT history have lasted three years, and Pruitt will be the 14th. Coaches who last that long used to have a level of success to stay around for a bit of time, so you’ll notice a couple of good years even mixed in to this list.

Which years are we talking about, though? What became of the coaches who oversaw such poor outings in the long term? Let’s break all of that down here. These are Tennessee football’s five worst seasons with a third-year head coach.