Coordinator churn and the Tennessee Volunteers

Coordinator continuity was a hallmark of the Phillip Fulmer Era of Tennessee football from 1992-2008. John Chavis served as Fulmer’s defensive coordinator from 1995 right through to the bitter end in 2008. The offensive coordinator position was also mostly stable with David Cutcliffe serving in that role from 1993-1998 and then again from 2006-2007. In the interim, Randy Sanders was the only other OC.

Until the 2008 season, Fulmer had a grand total of one defensive coordinator and two offensive coordinators over the course of 16 seasons. Whether things started going south for Fulmer as early as 2001 or whether the beginning of the end came later, it’s an indisputable fact that his team won the SEC East as late as 2007. Whatever success you give him credit for, that success occurred alongside an impressive record of coordinator continuity.

Ironically, Fulmer was done in by a failure in continuity. When Cutcliffe left the second time, Fulmer made a fateful decision. At a time folks were turning up the heat and setting the timer, Fulmer hired Dave Clawson to be his new offensive coordinator. It was either widely known or merely rumored at the time that the Clawfense took more than a single season to install, and it turns out, Fulmer didn’t have that much time.

Fulmer’s firing ushered in an unprecedented wave of head coach and coordinator churn that has, so far, lasted over a decade. Here’s the list of head coaches and coordinators that the Vols have cycled through since 2008.

That’s five head coaches, six offensive coordinators (one of them non-consecutive), and eight defensive coordinators over the course of 12 seasons. There was complete continuity among the head coach and both coordinators in only two of the past 12 years.

But is coordinator churn a symptom or a cause? Is it a necessary response to failure on the field or is it perhaps itself contributing to that failure?

Here’s a look at year-by-year churn and the total offense and defense, along with season records:

The first thing to note is that the Clawfense was indeed terrible in 2008. Jim Chaney’s first year as OC for Lane Kiffin’s 2009 team was already significantly better. If you look only at Chaney’s total offense for his first four seasons on Rocky Top, it will look like it took him four years to get rolling. But Dooley and his staff and stuff arrived in Chaney’s second year, and in 2011, just as they were beginning to hit their stride, Justin Hunter and Tyler Bray both got hurt and missed significant time. In his final year with Dooley in 2012, Chaney put up a whopping 475.9 yards per game, which is the best it’s been these past 12 years.

Under Dooley, the defense got worse in Justin Wilcox’s first season and then better in his second. But then Wilcox left, and Dooley was faced with a decision similar to that faced by Fulmer in 2008. He had to hire a new coordinator in a make-or-break year. He chose Sal Sunseri, whose defense gave up an astounding 471.33 yards per game in 2012. Dooley was fired because his first-year defensive coordinator was as bad as his four-year offensive coordinator was good.

Enter Butch Jones and his new staff, offensive coordinator Mike Bajakian and defensive coordinator John Jancek. With total coaching turnover, the offense suffered and the defense, although improved from the Sunseri debacle, was still terrible. When all three of those guys remained at their respective positions the following year in 2014, everything improved. The offense went from 353.3 yards per game to 370.5, and the defense went from allowing 418.4 yards per game to allowing only 364.6. The team went from 5-7 each of the past three seasons to 7-6.

The 2015 season is a bit of an anomaly, as Jones and Jancek were both back as head coach and DC, but Mike DeBord replaced Mike Bajakian as OC. DeBord appears to be the only new coordinator hire for an existing head coach that actually made things better in his first season, taking the total yards per game from 370.5 in 2014 under Bajakian to 422.3 in 2015.

The following year, though, Jones replaced defensive coordinator John Jancek with the widely-heralded Bob Shoop, and the Tennessee defense went from giving up 362 yards per game to allowing 449.2. He actually got only marginally better in his second year, and Jones then compounded the problem by making a similar mistake in replacing DeBord with Larry Scott. Under Scott, the offense went from 443.7 yards per game to 291.1. And that was the end of Butch Jones.

The entire coaching roster churned again in 2018 when Fulmer hired Jeremy Pruitt as head coach and Pruitt hired Tyson Helton as offensive coordinator and Kevin Sherrer as defensive coordinator. Only a single season later, though, Tennessee already has two new coordinators in Jim Chaney and Derrick Ansley. Only time will tell whether there will be a first-year dropoff due to yet another season of coordinator churn.

Tennessee’s struggle over the past 12 years has coincided with unprecedented levels of coaching turnover, especially in the coordinator positions. The data suggests that this churn isn’t a symptom of the problem, but perhaps the problem itself. There is a transitional period not only for new head coaches, but for new coordinators as well, and they don’t seem to get honeymoons.

It is true that a major college football program can’t keep an under-performing staff just for the sake of continuity, but it’s also true that a certain level of continuity is necessary to an informed decision about that staff.

If Fulmer is relatively certain that he has the right guys in place, his most important job is to foster the same continuity he achieved during his head-coaching tenure. To do that, he’s going to need to commit to keeping all of them and sticking with them for a certain number of years, even when things go bad for a spell.