There are so many things wrong with the Jauan Jennings news that I don’t even know where to start. In case you haven’t heard yet, the news is this: Jennings posted an R-rated (for language) video to Instagram, the sanitized gist of which was that Tennessee’s coaches were liars, and he was going home. Shortly thereafter, interim head coach Brady Hoke announced that Jennings had been dismissed from the team.
First, if you are late to the party, you might have some trouble appreciating the full context of what happened. I saw the video last night. It was a video recording of a phone that was playing the video, but after searching for about 15 minutes this morning, I can no longer find Jenning’s original video. This one from Sports Illustrated is the closest to the original that I’ve found, but it silences out all of the profanity and is incomplete to boot. A sanitized version relating that Jennings called the coaches names doesn’t really give you the full picture. If you’re going to have an opinion, you should find the full video and watch it (alone if you have kids and care about that stuff). He essentially flipped the entire coaching staff an especially angry double bird right to their faces.
But here’s something I don’t think anyone else is talking about yet. Jennings’ Instagram account is apparently private. Sure, he should have known that “private” doesn’t really mean “private” anymore, and he should have expected it to get out, but whatever media source ignored that fact and recorded their own video of the private video for the purpose of making it news probably shouldn’t have done that, either. Some non-media fan probably would have done the same thing at some point (and maybe it even started that way), and it almost certainly would have made the rounds on social media anyway, but do we really want to make public the things college athletes set up as private? This is not a criticism of all of the media reporting the news now that it’s out; it’s questioning the person who, unable to share or embed the video the usual way because of the privacy settings, decided to get around that by recording a video of Jennings’ video and making it news. And if Jennings intentionally allowed known media members into his circle of people entitled to see his private posts, well, then it’s his own fault, because then he essentially said those things right to the media. Regardless, we’re probably talking about this eventually no matter what, but I really don’t like the idea of sharing the actual video publicly unless public sharing was enabled.
Third, I was as shocked as everyone else that the school’s response was to dismiss Jennings from the team. How can an interim coach who’s only technically in charge for one more game of a dying season have the authority to make such a quick and drastic decision impacting the future of the program? It does certainly seem that the most cautious and prudent way out of the mess would have been to instead suspend Jennings indefinitely and wait for the program to settle.
I do think that that is true, but I also feel the need to clarify the narrative a bit. The shorthand for the story is that the interim coach dismissed a star player. That’s partially true but also incomplete. Brady Hoke probably doesn’t actually have the authority to make that call by himself, and he says that he didn’t. Athletic director John Currie was involved as well.
So, Currie probably had the actual authority and the final say. But why such a quick decision under the unique circumstances? Currie showed great patience in making the decision to fire Butch Jones, so why such a quick trigger here? So Jennings has some negative feelings about the coaching staff. Isn’t this the same staff that Currie felt so bad about that he fired them? (Yes, I know only Jones is actually gone right now. But most of the rest are going as well.)
Sure, Jennings didn’t express his message very well at all and shouldn’t have done it on social media, and maybe Currie felt that there was just no going back after that. You can’t stick the double birds in your employer’s face and just expect to go back to your desk when you feel like it. I’d bet that most acting head coaches would have dismissed an active player who did the same thing. It’s not irrational to believe that a player who has done that will never be able to play for the staff he so disrespected again.
But that’s the thing, none of these players are ever going to play for this staff again, not at Tennessee. He criticized, in his own unique way, the outgoing coaching staff, not the one he was playing for. So why not leave the question to the next coach?
Maybe Currie already knows who he’s going to hire. Maybe he consulted privately with that guy or knows what that guy’s decision on Jennings would be, and maybe he wanted to save him the trouble of having to burn some goodwill early by making that hard decision himself.
I don’t know. You don’t know. The whole thing is a terrible mess.
What’s worse, this should have been a time to push the reset button on the program, to purge most of the angst boiling over in the fan base. Who doesn’t love an interim coach? If he wins, cool. If he loses, it’s on the prior coach. And the athletic director had curried some favor with the fan base for making a move on Jones and had been positioned to make them very, very happy with the next hire.
But suddenly, things have soured again. It’s rare that an interim feels the heat of an angry fan base, but Hoke seems to have accomplished that, and Currie has just done considerable damage to any confidence the fan base may have had in him.
We don’t know all of the details. Perhaps Hoke and Currie actually made the right decision based on information that they have but we don’t.
Everything can be fixed by the right hire.
But people are nervous, and this didn’t help.
