Tennessee football finally facing Alabama with no ties to Crimson Tide

When Tennessee football visits the Alabama Crimson Tide on Saturday, nobody expects the Vols to put up a fight. However, fans can breathe a sigh of relief that they won’t be in Tuscaloosa, Ala. chasing the mystique of that program or Nick Saban anymore.

For the first time since 2009, the Vols will take the field with a head coach who doesn’t have ties to Alabama or Saban and wasn’t hired by a guy with ties to Alabama or Saban. Yes, it’s been that long since Vol fans didn’t have to think about affiliations with those two entities on their team.

In even more good news, that year was the closest Tennessee football has come to beating Alabama since the Tide’s winning streak over them began back in 2007. Remember, they were a blocked field goal away from victory late.

Over the last decade-plus, ever since Lane Kiffin left at the end of that 2009 season, the university has done everything it can to replicate the success of Alabama and Saban, and it did so by finding people connected to Alabama or Saban. It’s been a frustrating journey for Vol fans.

This all started when Mike Hamilton hired Kiffin’s replacement, Derek Dooley. Although Dooley himself never coached at Alabama, his selling point was being one of Saban’s top assistants during his run with the LSU Tigers.

That combined with Saban winning his first national championship at Alabama was enough for Hamilton to hire Dooley despite him having a losing record in three years with the Louisiana Tech Bulldogs. He was seriously trying to replicate Saban’s success.

A year and a half later, Hamilton was gone. Jimmy Cheek decided to go to Alabama to find his replacement, and he brought in the university’s assistant athletic director Dave Hart. Well, Hart sabotaged Dooley, hired a basketball coach he had to fire after a year due to an NCAA investigation and generated tons of controversy by getting rid of the Lady Vols name.

Beyond all of that, though, Hart’s most famous hire was bringing in Butch Jones. As a result, after Dooley, Tennessee football would spend the next five years losing to Alabama, getting blown out all but one time, under the leadership of a coach hired by somebody from Alabama.

To be fair to Hart, he did some good things, most notably hiring Rick Barnes to coach the men’s basketball program and stabilizing the university’s finances. Still, you’re judged on your football hires, and he whiffed.

After Hart was gone, the Vols had a chance again to make a hire. John Currie wasn’t connected to Alabama, and he did try to bring in a bunch of coaches, none of whom were connected to Alabama. However, we know of the Greg Schiano fiasco in 2017 and what followed that, which resulted in his firing as he almost secured a deal with Mike Leach.

Enter Phillip Fulmer, who launched a coup to become the school’s athletic director. Less than a week later, Fulmer hired Jeremy Pruitt, whose bloodline was almost pure Alabama, as he was a member of Saban’s staff from 2007 to 2012 and then in 2016 and 2017. Fulmer was trying to replicate the Georgia Bulldogs’ success with Kirby Smart with that hire. We know it failed.

Now, finally, Tennessee football has no Alabama or Saban ties. Danny White took over as athletic director earlier this year. He hired Josh Heupel. Neither of them have ever worked at Alabama or for or with Saban. In fact, nobody on the Vols’ staff have worked for either, a first since 2008.

This is how it needs to be. UT never finds success chasing Alabama, and all you have to do is go back in history. In 1970, after Doug Dickey left, the Vols named Bill Battle, a Bear Bryant disciple, as their head coach. A year later, the Tide began their 11-game winning streak in the series, and they have always led in the series by at least six games since.

Chasing Alabama is not the way for Tennessee football to return to glory. Being different is how they can do it. That’s been lost on university officials for a long time, but on Saturday, as the two face off, it may finally be changing.