Author Archives: Chris Pendley

The Other Side of the Desert

So here’s the thing: I’ve never actually written about a Good Football Team before. (For reference: I wrote from 2009 to 2017 or so, give or take a few months. I think. Memory is hazy these days.) Sure, you could argue the first half of Tennessee’s 2016 was a good team; on the other hand, that team gave us Champions of Life. I don’t think I can count that. I enjoyed 2012 way more than anyone had any right to but that team wasn’t good. (I’m not not planning on writing a Milton vs. Bray Tale of the Tape in ::checks calendar:: June? Man, being good at a lot of sports now is weird.)

2007? That season was hilarious and I will always enjoy the drive-it-like-you-stole-it ness of everything after Georgia, but I hadn’t started writing yet. 2001 and 1998 pre-date my Tennessee fandom; they aren’t really my teams in the way they’re Will or Joel’s (or your) teams.

Is there any other season pre-Heupel that would fit? I don’t think so; we had Good Football Moments, but not really Good Football Team.

Enter 2022, or rather, enter 2021 then look behind you. Pruitt wasn’t going to work out; regardless of the process that led us to Pruitt, you can’t run the 2012 Alabama playbook with less talent in 2018 and expect better results; even Alabama wasn’t running the 2012 Alabama playbook.  I still think the process ended up in as good a place as we could’ve hoped for, even if we ended up as College Football Twitter’s main character for a solid three weeks. Regardless: brunch and a desire to just move on did Pruitt in; another season or two would’ve done the trick.

Anyway, back to 2021. What did I know about Josh Heupel? Well, his teams were fun to watch; I probably watched more UCF than I did Tennessee for a year, maybe two. UCF games were reliably fun for a neutral and the 12 lead changes in almost every game didn’t matter to me since I didn’t really root for UCF. Would I call those UCF teams good? Eh. They were fine, and they were fun, and honestly during the Pruitt era “fine” and “fun” were enough for me to turn Heupel into appointment viewing.

And hey, that’s what 2021 was! It was fun, and it was fine. Watching Heupel’s teams a little more closely made me realize he tries to coach teams with a high floor; run enough plays and be successful enough to score on a couple more possessions than your opponent and that’ll be enough to beat most teams you have more talent than.  For all Tennessee’s struggles, there was still talent. The questions were twofold: 1) could Heupel recruit enough to raise the talent floor? 2) could Heupel get teams that had more talent? We saw flashes of the latter—Georgia 2021 being the best example, even if they were never winning that game—but we didn’t know if that was going to be anything past a flash.

I thought going into 2022 that 8-4 would be, you know, pretty good! We might be able to hang with Alabama or Georgia for a half but we weren’t deep enough, and I guess Kentucky or LSU or Florida are good so maybe beat one of them too, win the rest, and we can call that momentum. That sounds good, right?

Well.

About that.

It didn’t really start to click with me this Tennessee team was a Good Football Team until the third quarter of the Alabama game. That timing is a little weird, right? They blitzed LSU (and we didn’t think that LSU was any good until November, so while ending the LSU game before noon Central time was impressive we didn’t know if it was good, beat Florida but in a way that really didn’t feel comfortable, and even the first half against Alabama was the kind of early-game carnage we had seen before.

But the third quarter? That’s when I realized Alabama was emptying the tank against us. They didn’t have a choice if they wanted to win the game; that’s when I realized we belonged. We were a Good Football Team.

Of course, we know how that game ended, and we know what it feels like to be back at the top of the mountain, if only for a few days. Yeah, it was only a few days, and yep South Carolina sucked (it looked like a Madden-style No Way Game), but 10-2? That’s pretty good. 

Demolishing Vanderbilt after losing Hendon Hooker? Proof of concept this is sustainable. We didn’t necessarily need to know that, but another hallmark of a Good Football Team is being able to handle key losses.

While we’re here: beating Clemson was ….comfortable? As comfortable as three missed field goals by Clemson could be considered comfortable. It felt unhurried, like the team knew how to play to win instead of playing to not lose. Will talked about this a lot already; I’ll come back to it once I knock some of the rust off.

I have no idea where it goes from here; it looks sustainable and I don’t think it’ll stop being fun, but it’s worth looking back to remember how far we came. This whole Good Football Team is pretty new for a lot of us; it’s okay to take some time to reflect.

Taking the Long, Dumb Route to a Head Coach

You’d think we’ve gotten to the point where a Tennessee head coach search wouldn’t be a disaster zone. Over the last decade, maybe people would’ve learned something from the litany of past mistakes.

It’s been a decade, hasn’t it?

From the Clawfense to shirtless chain pictures to Coach O recruiting for USC in the back of the press room to Opportunity is Nowhere to finding Rommel (we never found him, did we?) to Five-Star Heart to Title IX payouts, it’s been a decade. I don’t blame anyone at this point for being done, and I don’t blame anyone for deciding to walk away.

We hoped this would pass once Butch Jones put a stamp on the 2017 season and proceeded to mail it in until he secured his buyout. We ended up with interim coach Brady Hoke, who has now been on a fired staff three years running. Jauan Jennings got kicked off the team instead of the more-normal suspension and re-evaluation under a new head coach.

The last year in football has been falling out of a tree and hitting every branch on the way down, no mean feat for a season that started with a literal trash can.

Well, great. Now what?

Anyway, after all that we’re stuck hoping that John Currie, former Kansas State AD turned Tennessee AD, would be able to guide us out of the muck. Currie, it should be noted, never hired a football coach at Kansas State. The main revenue-sport hire he did there was turfing Frank Martin for Bruce Weber. (Frank Martin, in case you forgot or checked out of college basketball, led South Carolina—South Carolina!—to a Final Four last year. This would be classified as “known defect” among the more engineering-inclined of the sports punditry.)

We’ve seen nothing in the last month that makes me think either Currie or the people working with him on this there has any idea what they’re doing. I’m left to believe we’re in the middle of a farce.

Given a month or so to plan following Butch Jones being shown the door and a pretty decent slate of potential head coaching candidates, we’ve seen:
– Nothing until the end of football season. That’s firmly in the annoying-but-explainable camp, but we’re being completist here. This is probably fine.
– Greg Schiano get offered the head coaching job, accept the position, and then back out after a revolt for most of last Sunday.

Wait, hold up.

If you’d like to write off Schiano being involved with Penn State during the Sandusky era, sure. That still leaves the relatively lackluster record at Rutgers, who rolled up wins back when the Big East was sending 8-4 UConn to the Fiesta Bowl, the player revolt in Tampa Bay, the MRSA outbreak in Tampa Bay, and the, well, zero jobs he was in the running for before being plucked off the scrap heap to give up 55 points to Iowa. Really, take your pick on why this was a bad idea, you’ve got options.

Oh yeah, and the memorandum of understanding. Apparently, Schiano signed a memorandum of understanding prior to the scuttled announcement on Sunday. This is a little baffling, and the only thing I can figure out happened here is someone in the athletic department was directed to run a find-replace on Rick Barnes’s old MOU and forwarded it to Schiano’s agents/lawyers. This was saved because Beverly Davenport didn’t sign the MOU, I guess? Somehow, ending up on the hook for Schiano’s buyout after possibly employing him for four hours is about the most appropriate way for that story to end.

Stop me if any of the above sequence makes you feel good about the people still looking to make a hire. On the other hand, if you’re into dark humor last week was great.

Anyway:

We backed up the truck for Mike Gundy and made him say no. This was good! This was a good idea! The process they used to get here is:

  • Florida hired Dan Mullen, who I’d say was now off the board but I’m honestly not sure he was on there in the first place.
  • Had ….something weird happen with Jeff Brohm. I’m not sure what happened here, so I’m just going to make a note and come back to it.
  • Arizona State hired Herm Edwards. That has nothing to do with Tennessee, but you probably missed this yesterday and it did pretty much lock in Tennessee to the second-worst hire of the offseason at worst. Yay?
  • Made an offer to Dave Doeren, whose coaching profile looks like “hey, what if we hired Butch Jones but only with 75% of the success?”
  • Had the band play over videos and every single stoppage during the Tennessee-Mercer game to drown out “Fire Currie’ chants coming from the student section. If you missed the game last night, 1) you should watch the Basketvols, they’re good!, 2) you could hear some chants over the TV in the first half.
  • Jimbo Fisher left FSU, presumably to take Texas A&M’s open head coaching gig.
  • Doeren, head coach at NC State, decided he wanted no part of this.

I don’t blame Doeren, for the record. This job was going to be brutal—and, since he’s turned it down, too tough for him. We can say that now. Tennessee is a hard, but rewarding job, and the difficulty is directly related to the reward. Coming in for a fanbase that lacks hope after the demolition job of 2017 would’ve meant he was updating his resume by 2020 at the latest.

You’d be forgiven at this point for ignoring the actual issue at hand–oh yeah, by the way there’s an early signing period this year!–and just descending into the kind of macabre comedy that ….well, isn’t really America’s bag quite frankly. If you’re the kind of person who watches Black Mirror for the comedy, this week has been great.

Eeeeeeeesh.

The nice part about Currie and crew screwing up this badly is that they’ve left all the good candidates still on the board. Somehow, Kevin Sumlin might actually take our phone call. Les Miles is still on the board. Tee Martin? Around, confused that he hasn’t been called, but he’s around! I’m contractually obligated to mention Lane Kiffin is around, and I guess I’ll even go above and beyond the contract to mention that going after him will end in him also publicly turning Tennessee down. Everyone and their brother, sister, cousin, aunt, and uncle has their favorite candidate. (For me? Go talk to Brohm, bury your pride, bring your best I’m-sorry, and bring your wallet.)

At this point, regardless of end result the process that was taken to get there has been abhorrent, the worst combination of administrative slapstick and ideas perpetuated by the same thought process that got Chan Gailey job after job after job. If we end up with a head coach that isn’t a disaster zone, consider it a bonus.

In the meantime, congrats to future Tennessee head coach Dave Clawson, because ….hey, do you trust Currie to not do that?