When you are in Tennessee in your current state, you make a Maybe Hire.
Maybe it works. Maybe not. You can have hope, but no certainty. You’re not in a position to attract a secure candidate, A-list, to run your dilapidated football program – new athletic director Danny White has tried this in recent days and it hasn’t worked. So keep working at the bottom of the list – from proven to brilliant to probable – until you get a yes.
It can be a great job, on paper, in the top half of the Southeastern Conference and with the potential to compete for league and national titles. But at the moment, it is an unshakable job, full of dangers and troubled by the unknown, with a fan base that could be politely characterized as volatile. This reduces the viable group of candidates to Maybes, and White chose a familiar Maybe.
Reinhold Matay / SUA TODAY Sports
This is Josh Heupel, introduced on Wednesday as the new volunteer coach. Heupel was taken out of Central Florida by White, himself a freshman from UCF last week, making it fair to wonder if White also loaded the Knights 2017 (legendary) National Championship stadium sign on a private jet in Tennessee. The Big Orange raid on Orlando took everything except the last thread of Who Hash.
Heupel was 28-8 at UCF, a stellar record, but there is evidence that the program was falling below him. He inherited a team that came out of a 13-0 season with a defender returning to McKenzie Milton, and his seasons went 12-1, 10-3, 6-4. After a 9-0 debut season in the American Athletic Conference, he went 11-5 in the next two seasons.
(History can look at Milton with the best kindness of anyone when it comes to the UCF ’17 – ’18 race. Scott Frost’s record as head coach with Milton as his starting quarterback was 17-6; no Heupel’s record with Milton was 11-0, without him it was 17-8, and Milton’s presence at UCF played a significant role in his Hawaiian colleagues and current QB, Dillon Gabriel comes to school there.)
For many Tennessee fans, renting a Heupel is the next step in dealing with the program. They ignored a dozen years of evidence that the Flights are just another program – instead of believing in Santa Gruden and believing that hiring coaches like Greg Schiano and Dave Doeren is under them. The fact is that this is a difficult sale at the moment.
James Franklin did not leave the security of the Penn State job in Tennessee, no matter how much money it was rumored that White would offer. PJ Fleck? Please. SMU coach Sonny Dykes is not leaving Texas for a wrestling program that must fight Alabama, Georgia and Florida every season. And offensive coordinator Tony Elliott wasn’t going to give up on Clemson’s solid reliability for Rocky Top.
Since Phillip Fulmer’s last good season in 2007, this has been Tennessee football: a losing streak (78-82 overall, 36-70 in the SEC, zero East Division titles); a program in constant transition (Heupel is the sixth permanent head coach); and now a program immersed in a major self-recognized NCAA investigation, which has months (probably years) left to be revealed.
Between ’08 and ’20, the SEC’s winning percentage of Vols was .339. The only programs in the Eastern Division smaller than these are Kentucky and Vanderbilt. South Carolina (.481) and Missouri (.473 since joining the league in ’12) are well ahead of Tennessee.
The recordings against the teams Vols fought in the East are frightening: Florida has won 15 of the last 16 against Tennessee; Georgia has won nine of the last 11. And the annual cross-rivalry against Alabama is a recurring nightmare – Crimson Tide has won 14 in a row. Ever since Terrama Cody, Bama’s striker, blocked a goal in the last second for the victory in ’09, Lane Kiffin’s only season at UT, the destinies of the two programs have been drastically divergent.
Alabama wins national titles. Tennessee leads the nation in dysfunction.
White’s employment was at least a step toward competence and away from the toxic culture that has permeated Knoxville for far too long. Fulmer threw his place as athletic director amid a ridiculous revolt of the fans and wasted no time proving his inadequacy in this position. He hired Jeremy Pruitt, unproven, because he was the coach of the SEC ball, and what he got was a guy who couldn’t win and whose staff couldn’t follow the rules.
The former coach, which rents comfort AD is a relic of the twentieth century. White is a clean break from that. He is paid a lot ($ 1.8 million) to clean up the place and run a waterproof department for fans and rappers who get mixed up. The way Vol Nation accepts a Heupel employment that does not delight the population will be a measure of its understanding that this is a new era.
Heupel fulfills White’s wish for a coach with a certain brand – in this case, a strong, fan-friendly offense, conducive to recruitment. UCF was second nationally in total offense in the 1920s, averaging 568.1 yards per game, and Gabriel led the nation in court play per game to 357. After years of prosecuting Tennessee offenses, this it should change.
The flip is that UCF allowed 33.2 points per game in ’20, ranked 92nd nationally and is the highest since a winless season in ’15. This was an important reason why the Knights did not defeat a single team last season, which ended with a winning record. That 6-4 mark is not built on anything substantial.
Cincinnati, a more complete team, had become the dominant program in AAC. Memphis won the league title in ’19. UCF’s leadership was brilliant, but short, leaving questions about whether it could be replicated in a much tougher conference and at a school with fewer natural advantages.
Maybe Josh Heupel can do it. Maybe he can’t. That’s exactly the kind of employment Tennessee was going to do.