It would seem like things couldn’t have gone any worse for Tennessee football than they did when the Vols hired Jeremy Pruitt in December of 2017. After all, Pruitt was fired three years and one month later after two losing seasons, a serious NCAA investigation and a barrage of players leaving.
However, a hire the Vols almost made that same time would’ve been even worse.
Before Phillip Fulmer orchestrated a coup to take over as athletic director and hire Pruitt, his predecessor, John Currie, was scrambling to find a coach after fans in full forced nuked his attempt to hire Greg Schiano (at the demand of Jimmy Haslam and Peyton Manning). One name he landed on was recently fired Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy.
This was the second time Tennessee football targeted the Cowboys head coach, as Dave Hart expressed interest in 2012 after firing Derek Dooley before landing on Butch Jones. Gundy rejected them both times. Had the Vols hired Gundy in 2012, they would’ve seen some success. However, his rejection in 2017 was a blessing in disguise.
Gundy’s coaching profile has always been running a cutting-edge offense and developing overlooked players over a three or four-year period to fit it. He had great success in the 2010s doing that. In the NIL and transfer portal ere, though, he was falling behind because he wouldn’t target transfers.
That created issues, which is why he lost his job.
As a result, had he been with the Vols, he actually would have had more success than Pruitt from 2018 to 2020 and wouldn’t have committed the recruiting violations, meaning he would have stayed on the job. Then, mediocrity would have set in in 2021 and gotten worse in 2022, 2023 and 2024. Gundy’s failures would’ve been even worse playing in the SEC.
By that point, the Vols would have had to fire him, and they’d be in the same position now they were in four years ago, only this time with no Danny White leading the program, as Currie would still be leading the charge. A decade of dysfunction would have turned into two decades of dysfunction.
Theres’ no doubt Gundy knows offense. His style got him within a hair of playing for the national championship in 2011, and if his team didn’t blow a three-score lead to an unranked Iowa State Cyclones team on a Friday night that year, they would have played the LSU Tigers in the title game.
Instead, they choked, LSU was forced to play the Alabama Crimson Tide in a rematch, the college football world got angry, and it set the stage for the playoff. If LSU faces them, they likely win, Les Miles likely remains coach there longer, and Nick Saban has one less national championship on his resume.
Beyond that, Gundy’s legacy includes his colorful press conference back in 2007. It also includes a lot of great successes on the field, though. Still, with his firing, Tennessee football fans can look back to 2017 and be extremely grateful they didn’t hire him to replace Jones that year.
