Why Won't Anyone Coach at Tennessee?

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills, but it looks like no one wants to be the head coach of the Tennesee Vols football team.   ESPN is reporting that David Cutliffe, former University of Tennessee offensive coordinator, withdrew his name from consideration as a candiate to replace Lane Kiffin as the head coach at Tennessee so that he could stay at DUKE.  Before Cutliffe got there, Duke, playing in the dominant ACC (please tell me you got the sarcasm), won a combined 10 games in its previous 8 seasons.  So apparently these days Duke FOOTBALL is a better place to be than Tennesse.  So is being the head coach in waiting at Texas for perhaps a decade or more apparently, since Will Muschamp also turned down the job.

This makes no sense to me.  Tennesee is still a top 15 place to coach.  It’s in one of, if not the, best football conference in America, has 6 national championships, boasts a 100,000+ capacity stadium with crazy loyal fans and has been a traditional NFL pipeline (see Manning, Peyton and Haynesworth, Albert).  Even if guys like Muschamp and Cuttliffe don’t want to end up there forever, it’s not a bad stepping stone to a top 5 job, as Lane Kiffin illustrated.

A lot of speculation about why people don’t want to coach there now is that the program is somehow now “runined” becuase Lane Kiffin bailed after one season.  I don’t see how that’s possible.  Yeah, a lot of recruits could leave for USC a-la John Callipari, but a good coach could easily steal a bunch of those guys back.  Plus the recruit problem could give the new head coach a lot of leeway with performance next season…”Sorry fans, I came into this situation late, we may have a rough year next season but I’ll turn it around.”  It’s also not like the players left at Tennessee are bums– they were recruited by an SEC powerhouse so they must be pretty damn good.  Nick Saban demonstrated that you can take a historically good program that has been down for a while and turn it into a national championship team pretty quickly if you are a good coach.  Plus as much faith as I have in Lane Kiffin’s ability to ruin a program, it takes exceptional skill to completely destruct it in one year, and I doubt Lane has that kind of saavy.  People also say Kiffin’s series of minor recruiting violations could mean sanctions are coming against the program.  While there were a bunch of minor violations at Tennessee under Kiffin, I doubt they are enough to warrant any major sanction (it’s not like we’re talking Reggie Bush type stuff).

It looks like some less known coach is going to get a chance to prove himself at a historically great football program.  I think that a lot of these big name guys aren’t taking the Tennessee job says more about them than it does about the program.  It says they are scared to fail and doubt their ability to bring Tennessee back to prominence.  It’s too bad for Tennessee that they won’t get a big name guy– but I won’t be shocked if whoever goes there manages to do well in 2-3 years and keep moving on up the coaching ladder.