FreedS[ohh]lave;2441847 said:
I dont know the ins and outs of these schools like yall down south nikkas but why do people feel like Tenesse is forever finished?
Wasnt Albama bad for awhile? every big time school has long droughts,before Carrol got to USC they sucked for years
With what Albama did and now Notre Dame doesnt that show all you need is the right coach to turn your prograrm around?
So if these others schools that went from the top and fell for years and now came back up again why cant Tenesee eventually do that?
College football, like all things, is cyclical. They should be back, but who knows at this point. They're digging deeper and deeper into the abyss of irrelevance.
It boils down to recruiting, IMO. USC and UCLA can walk out the front door and fall into four and five star recruits. Notre Dame is a national brand and will get the eye of any recruit that they call, even in a down spell. Alabama is a national brand as well. Tennessee doesn't have great high school football, so it's not just a matter of "we'll just make sure we lock down in-state recruiting". They have to have a coach in place who can go into other areas and get recruits (in other words, what they had with Phil Fulmer). The problem is that current coaches look at what they dealing with in the SEC and know that if they not popping in 2-3 years, they might get the boot. Charlie Strong knows he can stay at Louisville, move to the ACC, and conceivably win 8-9 games a year and still
good.
Tennessee needs a good group of assistants that can recruit in the south and have connections down here. That's why Strong would have been an amazing hire, because there are a lot of connections that can get players to Tennessee. That's also the reason that Fulmer, Chavis, Cutcliffe, and Trooper Taylor were able to get talent into UT.
I wouldn't protest.
Bama is more of a brand than Tennessee, at least in my opinion. I mentioned this in another thread regarding Tennessee, but the layout of the state matters. Memphis is the largest city in the state? It's right next to the borders of Arkansas and Mississippi, while Knoxville is like 3-4 hours away. It's not like UT can claim a lock on the talent that comes out of there. From what I can see, in Alabama, you either about Alabama or Auburn. It's easier to recruit when you got one other crew to worry about.
The coach matters, but Bama is a type of place that can get four and five star recruits just off name. Like UNC: even when we went 8-20, Matt Doherty was still able to land talent like Felton, May and McCants, because it's UNC. The main problem that Tennessee is facing is that everybody else in the SEC is doing good. I heard on WFAN the other day that there are 9 SEC teams in bowl games, and they're favored in every single game. That's a grind. Not every coach is gonna want to sign up for that. When Tennessee was popping, I don't think the landscape was like that.
UT has to be able to lock down the best talent in the state (Fulmer missing out on PATRICK WILLIS WAS
)
after that they have to go into the Carolinas, VA, GA, Bama, Florida to pull talent. They used to pull the occasional talent from the midwest, TX, OK, and the west coast.
Nowadays they're getting fourth and fifth pick of the big guys, and 2nd/3rd pick of the 3 stars. that's not a winning recipe.
Not to mention that Dooley was outed by local coaches in the EAST TENNESSEE area for not recruiting worth shyt. How are you going to build connections when you can't even make a presence in your own fukking region?
Doesn't help Tennessee either that Auburn Bama Clemson and South Carolina with Spurrier is raiding metro Atlanta talent either
All the in-state schools in the Carolinas and GA have gotten better since UT was able to poach the talent. Since then UT has also gotten worse. This isn't a coincidence.
And there is no way in hell they hire fulmer again. Especially since that would fracture the fan base.
