ESPN drops Tennessee football to Tier 3 coaching job

Prestige is falling for the Tennessee football Volunteers in the eyes of ESPN+.

Despite being a top 10 FBS program all time in terms of wins and winning percentage, the status of Tennessee football continues to fall. Now, they have fallen in the new ESPN+ coaching job tiers for Power Five schools, updated on Tuesday.

Rocky Top is now considered a Tier 3 coaching job as Jeremy Pruitt enters his third year at the helm. The criteria for these tiers include program infrastructure, access to talent and history. Although UT has great history, its recent history is weak, and infrastructure was cited as an issue.

Adam Rittenburg, who wrote the article, put Tennessee football alongside the Nebraska Cornhuskers and Miami Hurricanes as schools that used to be Tier 1 coaching jobs. Here’s what he said about the Vols.

"Tennessee can recruit with the big boys, as Jeremy Pruitt is showing (and Butch Jones did for a while), and boasts strong facilities and fan support, but also a recent run of administrative turmoil."

This is a drop from where the Vols were four years ago, the last time ESPN+ did a tier ranking of coaching jobs for Power Five schools. That article was written by Travis Haney, and UT was a Tier 2 school then.

Of course, at that point, it was a different story. The Vols were a Tier 2 school largely due to their nearly-decade worth of irrelevance. However, there was plenty of room for encouragement, as all signs were pointing to the program coming back.

Butch Jones had just guided the program to its first nine-win season and top 25 finish in eight years at the time, and he had everybody returning to a program that would enter the season in the top 10. The sexual assault lawsuit against the school, which resulted in the Peyton Manning scandal resurfacing, was an issue. But Haney had a lot to say about the bright side.

"The talent level is as high as it’s been since the early 2000s, thanks to Butch Jones hauling in three consecutive top-15 classes, including two in the top five. A coach taking over would not have anything close to the roster makeover that Jones faced. Nor would that new coach have to be so relentlessly positive in coaching up not only the team’s players but a down-in-the-dumps fan base."

Now, we all know what happened after that. Jones guided that team to a 5-0 start only to see it lose three straight and finish 9-4, largely due to lack of conditioning and in-game coaching errors. If he fixes one of those, the program goes 11-1 in the regular season.